Author: Brian McNaughton
Publisher: Wildside Press
Binding: Hardback
Publication Date: August 2000
Now we all know that I don’t read a lot of horror but I do dabble now and then. Especially around Halloween. So I feel funny writing something like this but, based on my limited experience, The Throne of Bones doesn’t read like other horror novels. It doesn’t seem to fit into any of the more prevalent molds, like supernatural, or occult or possession.
In fact I’d go so far as to say that even though Throne of Bones is called horror that it probably would be more akin to that brand of pre-Tolkien, pre-marketing-term fantasy that was simply known as “weird fiction”. This is a book that draws from a different well of source material that we are used to seeing.
It might also be telling that it was nominated for the World Fantasy Award.
Regardless of what it’s to be categorized as the world created in the pages is as fully imagined and original as any other that we have seen.
Even though it’s not used a lot I am a fan of the mosaic novel structure, which The Throne of Bones employs. On the surface level it seems as if it might be a short story collection. But then, as you continue reading, the different parts start fitting together in unexpected ways. The relationships between characters; conclusions or continuations of other plot lines; and histories and futures of people and places all weave together from one story to the next.
All of which is told in a writing style that is dominated by lush, almost decadent, language.
What’s interesting is how this structure is juxtapositioned with the material presented. For all of the sensual detail and for all of it’s viscera (sex, violence, eating the dead) it ultimately engages the reader more, not on a gut level, but on an intellectual one as you try to slot each story into a time line and suss out all of the ways that they interact and intersect with one another.
I do have to wonder, aloud, at the possibility that The Throne of Bones is in, some ways, to the horror genre what Gormenghast is to the fantasy genre. Will future generations of readers hold it up as a forgotten and ignored masterpiece? I don’t know. But for those interested in original pieces of fantasy, horror, whatever The Throne of Bones is a must read.
