The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

by Sarah Monette

Overview

• Kyle Murchison Booth is the unlikeliest of characters to gain a cult following, yet he has. Eccentric, socially awkward Booth is an introverted museum archivist, descended from a most unusual family, who frequently finds himself in the midst of the most unsettling supernatural experiences and strange necromantic mysteries. A gentleman and a scholar, the unwilling hero persevered through The Bone Key, a series of interconnected short stories, to win readers' hearts (and possibly their souls).
• This new edition, with a "puzzle" cover and a new introduction by one of Booth's "successors" at the Samuel Mather Parrington Museum, will delight current fans and allow even more to discover its dark charms.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781607012900
Publisher:	Prime Books
Publication date:	10/18/2011
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

Table of Contents

The dead and the monstrous will not leave Kyle Murchison Booth alone. An unwilling foray into necromancy makes him sensitive to--and attractive to--the creatures who roam the darkness of his once-safe world. Ghosts, ghouls, incubi: all have one thing in common. They know Booth for one of their own.

Editorial Reviews

Writing in the tradition of M.R. James and Algernon Blackwood, Monette reconstructs the traditional English ghost story-insinuated horror, no gratuitous sex or violence-with a decidedly modern-day approach in this laudable collection of 10 necromantic mystery stories featuring introverted museum archivist Kyle Murchison Booth. Noteworthy selections include "Elegy for a Demon Lover," which chronicles Booth's entanglement with a seductive otherworldly entity who teaches him about "pleasure and pain and the shadowed places in-between." In the brilliantly Lovecraftian "Bringing Helena Back," Booth agrees to help an old college friend bring his wife back from the dead, with horrifying results. Booth also investigates the skeleton of a woman sealed within the basement walls of the museum where he works, a house haunted by the spirit of a young girl and the ghost of a murdered private school student. Cerebral, ethereal and stylishly understated, this entrancing collection will appeal to fans of literary horror, dark fantasy and supernatural mystery. (Jan.)

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