It was only at the beginning part of the story, when you were young and didn’t know any better, that you could be happy and carefree. She didn’t even believe in happy middles. Yes, piles of bones, dead animals hung from trees, and a huge creature silently stalking people in the dark are pure horror, but Mattie’s inner world is even darker, and the way Henry writes about it is brilliant: Horror fiction can make readers feel a plethora of things, and the sadness in this novel overpowers the horror. Luckily, Mattie’s arc includes many important realizations, and her anger at William blossoms into hatred and a thirst for revenge that feels righteous. More than a wife, William raised himself a slave, and he does everything in his power to keep her and the crimes he committed to get her from the rest of the world. He kidnapped, groomed, and then more-or-less enslaved Samantha, turning her into Mattie via physical and psychological abuse, religious zealotry, and deprivation. The beauty of Near the Bone is that it delivers big, bad monsters hiding in the woods but also a very human one, and the human one is often worse than the supernatural ones. As her previous life comes back in bits and pieces, it crashes against Mattie’s reality and the perilous situation she finds herself in: hurt, barely able to talk, and on the run from William and whatever is hiding in the woods, in the company of three strangers.

Interacting with strangers, which Mattie never does, sets her on a path to freedom and helps her remember she’s not Mattie she’s Samantha. There’s something out in the woods, something big, something that could hurt them, and soon others come looking for it as well.

William and Mattie go exploring and find a cave full of carefully arranged bones and a pile of viscera. When Mattie finds the mutilated body of a fox in the woods, things change quickly.

Mattie’s existence is about chores, following orders, performing her wifely duties in an attempt to give William the sons he desperately craves, and surviving William’s short temper and constant – and brutal – physical abuse. She doesn’t remember a time before William and life in the cabin, which has no indoor plumbing. Mattie lives in a small cabin with her husband William. At once a narrative about abuse and survival and a tale of creatures stalking people up on a snow-covered mountain, Near the Bone is a tense, entertaining read with some great explosions of violence and a story of kidnapping and battling identities at its core. Cover by Spencer Fuller.Ĭhristina Henry’s Near the Bone is a horror novel that brings together real life horrors and monsters that walk a fine line between the supernatural and the what-if world of cryptozoology.

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