Review: The Bone Houses by Emily Lloyd-Jones
Overview:
Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
Not gonna lie, the cover of this one is what drew me in. Upon actually opening up the book and reading it, though, I found a pleasantly meaningful story about what it means to love, lose, and grieve. Of course, this wasn’t a perfect read. I have my qualms with the shortness of it and the use of one of the characters as a plot device. Still, I’m glad I picked it up.
Content Warning:
The Bone Houses contains animal death, death of a parent, grief, gore, and violence.
Book Description:
The Bone Houses is a folk horror novel that loosely draws from Welsh traditions. The story begins with 17 year-old Ryn. Ryn operates a graveyard in the small village of Colbren. Her mother is dead and her father disappeared in the coal mines years ago. Drowning in debt from their uncle’s gambling habits, Ryn and her siblings must make a payment or lose their family’s home forever. Just when all seems lost, Ellis, a young mapmaker with a mysterious past, shows up and offers to pay a handsome fee if Ryn will escort him through the mountains. This venture quickly becomes more dangerous when the bone houses (the undead) begin to arrive in Colbren and the surrounding forests in numbers never seen before. Ryn and Ellis soon find that they must locate and destroy the source bone houses’ magic or risk losing what’s most important to them.
On the Deeper Messages of the Story:
The Bone Houses explores death and loss in a very unique way. Normally, zombie books are meant to elicit fear and disgust, but Lloyd-Jones has a softer approach when writing of the undead. She uses folk horror as an opportunity to explore what grief might look like if we were given the opportunity to hold onto some version of our loved ones after they passed. As a reader, my heart ached for the main characters in the face of the choices they had to make, in the deciding of if and when it would be okay let go of those they had lost. Lloyd-Jones seeks to answer truly a heart-rendering rendering question, and, in her quest to do so, she will leave you both saddened and hopeful.
On the Length of the Book:
This book was just over 300 pages long with generous spacing between the lines, so it was a pretty quick read. While there’s nothing inherently long with brevity, I do think the story would have been better served if Lloyd-Jones stretched it into a duology and allowed us more time with the characters and the world in general. Ryn and Ellis quickly hop from place to place in the text: from the village of Colbren, to the woods, to an encampment, to abandoned copper mines, to an enchanted castle, and then back to Colbren again. There’s so much ground to cover in so little time, leaving hardly any room for the reader to get to know the intricacies of the characters and the deeper lore of the world around them. At the end of the day, this led to the novel lacking a sense of intensity. It felt more like a series of events at some points than it did a high stakes struggle to save humanity from the undead.
On the Goat [Spoilers]:
Controversial opinion: I did not love the goat. The animal was endearing when it first refused to surrender or leave our main characters behind. HOWEVER, it became a scapegoat of sorts (sorry, not sorry) whenever Ryn and Ellis got themselves into sticky situations. Rather than having them suffer a blow or get creative with their problem solving, Lloyd-Jones used the goat as a plot device to help them narrowly escape pretty much every time. A pattern emerged in the text: Ryn would lose track of her axe, a bone house would attack, and just when all hope was lost — Deus ex Goat. It got repetitive and, thus, boring.