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Book 167, Fiction 157:
157. The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth, Sarah Monette.
The Bone Key is a collection of short stories which have as their narrator one Mr. Kyle Murchison Booth, an archivist at the Samuel Mather Parrington Museum with an unfortunate sensitivity to the supernatural.
The stories, as Monette points out in the introduction, owe a debt to Lovecraft and M.R. James, but I'm embarrassed to admit it took me some time to work out that they had to be set in some kind of 1920s/1930s milieu. They range in quality from the merely good to the utterly excellent.
'The Venebretti Necklace', 'Wait For Me' and 'The Wall of Clouds' are perhaps the best three of the collection. In 'The Venebretti Necklace', Booth discovers a skeleton behind a wall in the basement of a museum, and the old scandal of a lost necklace and a missing woman. 'Wait For Me' is the chilling tale of a haunting, and 'The Wall of Clouds' finds Booth in a convalescent hotel where two chatty old ladies are older and odder than they seem, and strange and inexplicable things occur.
Booth himself is an interesting protagonist. He's painfully shy, even withdrawn, and dedicated to his work; nevertheless, in stories such as 'Elegy for a Demon Lover' and 'The Green Glass Paperweight' we catch flashes of a more complex picture, and I, for one, hope to see more of Kyle Murchison Booth in the future.
Altogether recommended.
Were it not for the fact the sky turned a slightly brighter shade of pallid grey around noon, I would readily believe the sun failed to rise today. It is dark. And wet. And has been so all day.
I hate wet winters.
157. The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth, Sarah Monette.
The Bone Key is a collection of short stories which have as their narrator one Mr. Kyle Murchison Booth, an archivist at the Samuel Mather Parrington Museum with an unfortunate sensitivity to the supernatural.
The stories, as Monette points out in the introduction, owe a debt to Lovecraft and M.R. James, but I'm embarrassed to admit it took me some time to work out that they had to be set in some kind of 1920s/1930s milieu. They range in quality from the merely good to the utterly excellent.
'The Venebretti Necklace', 'Wait For Me' and 'The Wall of Clouds' are perhaps the best three of the collection. In 'The Venebretti Necklace', Booth discovers a skeleton behind a wall in the basement of a museum, and the old scandal of a lost necklace and a missing woman. 'Wait For Me' is the chilling tale of a haunting, and 'The Wall of Clouds' finds Booth in a convalescent hotel where two chatty old ladies are older and odder than they seem, and strange and inexplicable things occur.
Booth himself is an interesting protagonist. He's painfully shy, even withdrawn, and dedicated to his work; nevertheless, in stories such as 'Elegy for a Demon Lover' and 'The Green Glass Paperweight' we catch flashes of a more complex picture, and I, for one, hope to see more of Kyle Murchison Booth in the future.
Altogether recommended.
Were it not for the fact the sky turned a slightly brighter shade of pallid grey around noon, I would readily believe the sun failed to rise today. It is dark. And wet. And has been so all day.
I hate wet winters.
