These Bones

Literary folk horror. A beautiful piece of writing. The author is a rural historian and her expertise comes through: the characters are rich and full and unforgettable.......more

Well, this was interesting. Too complicated of a read to simply define as good or otherwise and a pretty striking amount of content crammed into such a slender volume. Like many books these days this one is about race, specifically black experience in the 1920s and 30s in one neighborhood of Bramble......more

A strange and weird story told through genre-bending vignettes (interviews, retrospective book chapters, sermons, etc.). The novella is historical speculative fiction. It was hard for me to keep up with all the many characters. I am definitely going to have to re-read it, hopefully, I'll understand......more

These Bones by Kayla Chenault takes place in the Bramble Patch, a neighbourhood in the fictitious town of Napoleonville and tells the tale of the Lyon family who face racism, poverty, the grisly appetites of a pimp known as the Barghast, as well as the unpredictability of nature. It is told in a non......more

Told by multiple narrators looking back, this is the story of the black neighbourhood of a city in 1909 and the racism, oppression and inequality its residents suffer. In the style of Percival Everett, Chenault uses horror as a medium to get across gross injustice, but here it works less well, the h......more