By Brendan Carrion
Book Review:
Hammers on Bone
(Persons Non Grata)
by Cassandra Khaw
Copyright 2016, Tor.com
108 pgs
Hammers on Bone is a quick, genre fusion jaunt through Lovecraft country via Raymond Chandler. Is it a gritty, London-based noir with a Cthulhu twist? Or is it an inherently cthonic story with a detective at its center? At the end of the day, it’s hard to tell and it doesn’t really matter.
As readers, I think that over the past 10 to 15 years we’ve been increasingly exposed to genre-bending stories. This fragmentation of genre happened in the music industry first. Propelled forward by SoundCloud rappers, obscure Norwegian black metal, and entire electronic genres with just a handful of followers, I think it’s become hard to recommend an artist to a friend without first trying to describe them in the adjective-laden vocabulary of a marketing director.
Author - Cassandra Khaw
It’s my understanding that the good old days of writers sitting at home for months or years, sweating over a novel and then trucking it around to publishers and agents are deader than Elvis. Now writers go to pitch meetings, with an outline or a three sentence premise. They meet the prospective purveyor of their cultural capital and they better have some buzzwords in that elevator pitch. It had better sound marketable, like it could be, or should be, a movie.
Cthulhu Noir? Horror Crime? Let’s just say Hammers on Bone is both.
If that sounds good, you will probably like it. I certainly did.
I won’t spoil it for you. It’s too good. It’s also very short, which is one of the things about it that’s so great. The breezy 108 pages have a very light word count and a practiced reader will cut through this thing in a couple of hours or less.
Hammers on Bone follows John Persons, a supernatural detective working tough London neighborhoods. He has some dark secrets and you’ll learn about them when you read the story. He’s enough John Constantine that you are happy you picked this up, but unique enough that you don’t feel cheated.
John is hired by a pre-adolescent boy to kill his stepfather. The boy claims his stepfather is a monster, both literally and figuratively.
This is a little on the nose, but the story takes off from there. The plot proceeds in pretty linear fashion as Persons sets off on his mission, cutting a more or less straight line through a poverty entrenched London industrial neighborhood. We have our stock noir characters to interact with but Khaw lends them a hint of the contemporary so that even though we’re on well-trod ground, what we’re reading feels fresh, if not necessarily ground breaking. The story follows noir beats like Khaw is studying the genre. It’s an homage, really.
The thing that elevates Hammers on Bone from just-another-book-that-I-read to book-that-I-force-into-people’s-hands is Khaw’s immense talent for language. I won’t dither around trying to find a clever way of saying this: Khaw is an immensely gifted writer and her prose is just plain beautiful. I enjoyed reading her descriptions. Her landscapes are evocative and immersive. You can feel the story and the actions of the characters. I was never bored, never listless, never waiting for her to get to the point. I just wanted to read more.
Author Cassandra Khaw
I end up having some questions about the continuity presented. There is at least one moment in the book that completely seems out of sequence with the revelations at the end. Additionally, I feel like we’re led to believe early on that the plot of this book, if left unchecked, could add up to something bigger. But I didn’t see the payoff. Maybe I missed it. In the end, that’s fine. Chandler himself got caught in a continuity error and I actually preferred Khaw’s story being more intimate and character driven than THE FATE OF LONDON if you get my drift.
There is a sequel to Hammers on Bone that I’ve been uncharacteristically unable to acquire via Amazon. It’s called A Song For Quiet (Persons Non Grata Book 2). The blurb tells me that I’ll get to revisit John Persons, but that he won’t be the central character. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on that book so that I can disappear into Khaw’s world once more.
So Hammers on Bone passes the test. It’s a genre laden mash-up that’s low on surprises but big on talent. And it would make a great movie, to boot.
UPDATE: Since the writing of this piece, my copy of A Song For Quiet has shipped from Amazon. I guess it was a snag in supply or something. But I’m happy that it’s on it’s way. Expect a review of the sequel shortly.
Brendan Carrion is an independent game designer living in Phoenix, Arizona. The ashcan for his roleplaying game, Ravenous, is due out in August of 2020. In the meantime he can be found as producer and co-host of the anarcho-horror roleplaying podcast Full Metal RPG.
Have you listened to our HORROR Podcast? This week on Beyond The Void Horror Podcast. We got in the Halloween spirit with The Amittyville Horror Trilogy. Rebecca Rinehart joins to talk about The Amittyville Horror (1979), Amittyville 2 The Possession (1982) & Amittyville 3-D (1983). It was a fun episode! Check it out! Listen on iTunes Here or on Spotify here!