The Bone Key

[sawyl]

In the prologue to her anthology The Bone Key, Sarah Monette describes the stories in the collection as her attempt to mix the ideas of HP Lovecraft and MR James with better characterisation and a more modern approach to psychology. And I'm happy to be able to report that she succeeds in spades: The Bone Key is a wonderful mix of horror and gothic that comprehensively outstrips its antecedents, not least thanks to Monette's beautiful (and distinctly non-Lovecraftian) ear for language.

The loosely linked series of stories are narrated by Kyle Murchison Booth, a senior archivist at the prestigious and eccentric Parrington Museum, whose work in the Rare Books Department has brought him into contact with all sorts of occult oddities. Booth is a prickly character. Brilliant and inarticulate, it's possible to count the number of successfully delivered sentences on one hand. He is gay, standoffish, eschewing handshakes and physical contact, without any real friends. He's obsessively polite even past the point where it gets him into trouble, and calls everyone by their surname, even when they ask him not to:

"Oh God, is it going to be 'Miss Coburn' and 'Mr Booth' all evening long? My Christian name is Claudia, and I beg you will use it. And yours is... Karl? No."
"Kyle," I said, "But no one calls me by it."
"What do your friends call you?"
I bit back the instinctive honesty of, I have no friends, and said "Booth, mostly"

Like any good gothic hero, Booth frequently finds himself at the mercy of event which, because he's a respectable 20th century male and not a fainting 18th century noblewoman, means that he is either trapped into doing something because it would be rude to refuse or that he'd like to refuse but can't quite manage to get the words out in time. And these events often happen in suitably gothic locations: the sprawling catacombs of the Parrington, his old school, a sinister hotel and chalybeate, etc, all of which are realised in delightfully horrific detail.

Conclusions? An astonishingly good anthology of short stories that mixes the horrific and gothic and psychological to great effect. Very highly recommended.