Author Topic: Heaven's Bones by Samantha Henderson  (Read 2912 times)

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on: October 06, 2008, 06:44:25 PM
I finished reading this book over the weekend.  It's a horror novel set mostly in Victorian Era London about a doctor who goes insane when his wife dies during childbirth.  He begins to abduct women, whom he realizes are really fallen angels, and attempts to give them back their wings and hopefully return them to heaven.  It gets very twisted and twisty from there, complete with Jack the Ripper allusions, recording angels, intelligent (and tentacled) mists, and a detective with special insights.

The characters, which there are a lot of, are interesting. A few of them I smiled whenever I realized we were coming back to them.  Others, I winced when I read, because I knew horrible things were going to happen to people.  And there are some sick puppies in this book, the greatest of which is not the afforementioned Dr. Robards. 

I suppose some people would call this dark fantasy.  I'm not sure what the distinction is between the two, but okay.  There's definitely fantastical elements in it.  But I qualify it as horror because while reading it during my lunchbreak, I had to stop eating because of what I was reading.  (This is unusual for me.  For example, I listened to all of Sigler's Infected during my breakfast/morning commute. Even the chicken scissor scene. So I consider myself relatively strong-stomached when it comes to stories.)   

It also made me realize how terrifying and hard it must've been to have been a woman in this time period.  I know Samantha Henderson has talked about how part of it was inspired by conversations about how scary it must have been back then to have a child, must less the practice of delivering children.  Also, there's a female doctor who is laughed at and loathed by her male counterparts for practicing medicine.  Things have thankfully changed quite a bit since then. 

Henderson is also the author of EP's "Cinderella Suicide."  The writing here is similarly elegant, although the weird quotient is a bit different and more spread out.  When I first started it, I thought it'd be a bit more steampunk.  It's not really, although there's plenty of weird in it.  But it reads more like a supernatural horror novel set in that time period.  The images it evokes are both haunting and beautiful. 

It's an absolutely wicked read, if at times a bit complicated.  All in all, I highly recommend it.
« Last Edit: October 09, 2008, 09:11:44 AM by Russell Nash »