Book Review: The Ghost in Bone by Mike Carey

 

The Ghost in Bone by Mike Carey

138 pages, Hardcover
Published July, 2023 by Subterranean Press

One of the highlights of this year for me was hopping on the podcast and interviewing Mike Carey, who I spent many words introducing in the review for Infinity Gate, which is one of the absolute masterpieces released this year. He is an international bestselling author under the pen name MR Carey, hiding in plain sight with the debut The Girl With All the Gifts. That book became a major hit, and suddenly as Mike put it “nobody wanted Mike Carey books anymore.”

Well MR Carey took over the workload, but Mike Carey already had fans. Count me in the loyal bunch that read him before he wrote his first novel in the form of comics.  For me, it was Hellblazer which is still my favorite comic series ever. That is why I was first in line to read "The Devil You Know" the first(of six) Felix Castor novels, which Mike has stated was an attempt to do something comfortable, similar to Constantine.

Infinity Gate this year’s MR Carey is the kind of novel that when you read it, as a writer I know it took years, that Mike was experimenting, taking shots that missed the rim, but thankfully he often got his own rebounds. The Ghost in the Bone however feels like the writing/reading equivalent of putting on a comfortable old pair of shoes. A 138-page Felix Castor exorcism tale feels like Mike Carey could do with ease, but that said I think this is the best-written Castor story yet. MR Carey and the experience gained is apparent on every page.

I had a great experience reading this short novel mostly on a trip to and from the theater to see Godzilla Minus One. It is a short but powerful read. A $40 special edition (1,000 copies) that Mike traded a copy of my latest novel for, is not cheap so keep that in mind. This is the first new Castor story since 2009. The supernatural hard-boiled feeling has returned, and even though my memory was a bit foggy on what happened last I followed just fine. The Castor novels with equal parts gothic feeling as urban fantasy balanced with dark and gruesome humor.

The story is simple enough Castor answers an ad looking for London exorcists. The ad was placed by the daughter of a Russian oligarch who is desperate to find her missing father, alive or dead. Right from the start the weird energy drips off the page. Castor visits his zombie friend who has to keep his apartment cold so he doesn’t rot. The zombie is a hacker but that doesn’t play out until later.

My favorite moment of the book came when Castor performs the first step of the exorcism, a summoning.

“I’m lucky, if I’m in the presence of a ghost and I’m on a roll, the tune builds quickly and takes shape - the shape that for me is a kind of translation of the ghost’s essence or thisness.
That didn’t happen here, mostly because I wasn’t in the presence of more ghosts than I could readily count.
In answer to my tentative invitation a hundred echoes rose, and then a hundred more.”

Yeah, super creepy. The Ghost in Bone is a bite-sized but powerful Felix Castor story. I enjoyed every page.