The Throne of Bones, by Brian McNaughton
X Stars
7-14-2018

This is a book. After that, I'm not quite sure what to say about it. It has just about every content warning out there, and I can count on zero hands the number of people I would recommend it to. There's a fair amount of murder and rape, an occasional cannibalism, frequent necromancy, and a whole lot of having sex with, in, and around corpses. In the book there's this one faction, the Sons of Cludd, who are these ignorant, violent, witch burning hillbilly religious zealots. You know, republicans. At the start of the book they seem terrible and despicable. By the end of the book you're like "yep, that is the correct attitude given the world they are in. They are entirely rational to burn anything that seems weird because it inevitably turns out to be floridly evil." As with _Sufficiently Advanced Magic_, I'm surprised that this book was ever printed on paper much less won any awards.

So, that's the general content of the book. I've already lost all the sanity points I have to lose in this particular domain, so I didn't find the book scary or shocking, just very, very strange. The author's style contributes to this too; he takes a brisk and generally light hearted approach to the stories. There is one line near the end that sums up his voice perfectly:

"He brightened ever so slightly, like a leper with a new hat"

So the writing itself is succinct, creative, light, and playful. And due to this, the book reminds me more of a really fucked up Fritz Leiber, rather than someone heavy and depressive like Laird Barron.
Other notable bits:
- Quodomass and his difficulty with the basic social interactions needed to buy things. The struggle is real.
- The names: Lord Glyphtard, Seithreethra, Glitittia, Filloweela, Dodont, Glocque