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Boneland
BONELAND by Jeffrey Thomas will be limited to 400 signed and numbered hardback copies. The cover art and illustrations will be by Caniglia. Bloodletting Press Publishers In 1893, the Guests attempt their first contact with the human race. Families go mad. Parents commit suicide. A president is assassinated. By 1918, in the bleak boneland of the 20th Century, human assassins commit atrocities and global wars are waged to sate the appetites of the Guests. John Board is a crime scene photographer, whose nightmarish images of human destruction are used as titillating entertainment. Board's future is tied in with these unseen, unfathomable forces -- and so is his past. America is drowning in a sea of blood as flashbulbs click and movie cameras roll. The Guests are here to stay. BONELAND is a tale of a not-so-alternate history...a story of horror, science fiction, and the surreal by Jeffrey Thomas, acclaimed author of LETTERS FROM HADES, PUNKTOWN and MONSTROCITY.
167 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2004
19 people are currently reading
114 people want to read
About the author
Jeffrey Thomas
243 books278 followersJeffrey Thomas is an American author of weird fiction, the creator of the acclaimed setting Punktown. Books in the Punktown universe include the short story collections Punktown, Voices from Punktown, Punktown: Shades of Grey (with his brother, Scott Thomas), and Ghosts of Punktown. Novels in that setting include Deadstock, Blue War, Monstrocity, Health Agent, Everybody Scream!, Red Cells, and The New God. Thomas’s other short story collections include The Unnamed Country, Gods of a Nameless Country, The Endless Fall, Haunted Worlds, Worship the Night, Thirteen Specimens, Nocturnal Emissions, Doomsdays, Terror Incognita, Unholy Dimensions, AAAIIIEEE!!!, Honey Is Sweeter Than Blood, Carrion Men, Voices from Hades, The Return of Enoch Coffin, and Entering Gosston. His other novels include The American, Boneland, Subject 11, Letters From Hades, The Fall of Hades, The Exploded Soul, The Nought, Thought Forms, Beyond the Door, Lost in Darkness, and A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Dealers.
His work has been reprinted in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII (editor Karl Edward Wagner), The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror #14 (editors Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling), and Year’s Best Weird Fiction #1 (editors Laird Barron and Michael Kelly). At NecronomiCon 2024 Thomas received the Robert Bloch Award for his contributions to weird fiction.
Though he considers Viet Nam his second home, Thomas lives in Massachusetts.
His work has been reprinted in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII (editor Karl Edward Wagner), The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror #14 (editors Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling), and Year’s Best Weird Fiction #1 (editors Laird Barron and Michael Kelly). At NecronomiCon 2024 Thomas received the Robert Bloch Award for his contributions to weird fiction.
Though he considers Viet Nam his second home, Thomas lives in Massachusetts.
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July 20, 2017This hardcover is copy 88 of 300 signed and numbered by Jeffrey Thomas.
October 16, 2015
I read this book as part of my October 2015 quest to devour as many fine 21st-centuy Gothic horror novels as I can cram in. I haven't read any Jeffrey Thomas novels before, although I have enjoyed some Punktown short stories and admired his comments on an August 2015 horror convention panel.
Boneland is a curious blend of horror, fantasy, and alternate history. All three have a source in the arrival of strange beings on Earth during the late 19th century. Actually, there were two types of beings. First appeared the Guests, entities from far away in space, who could only manifest by meddling with human minds, leading to madness, violence, and possibly the first World War. After this, ah, embarrassment, the Guests sent an insect ecosystem, and this is where Boneland really shines.
You see, Thomas has these alien insects stand in for the 20th-century industrial era. The bugs serve as cameras, radios, telephones, televisions, advanced building materials, early computers (Kindle location 300), ocean liners (but not airplanes, 1628), and more. Their ecosystem evolves in parallel with the course of what we think of as technological innovation. Thomas has a great deal of fun (I imagine) with developing different insects for each need, giving us clever new forms. New human jobs and mutations appear, with persons paired with specialized bugs: Assassins who feed murderous imagery to their riders, Mediums ridden by brain bugs (example: 695). The titular Boneland is Hollywood, a nice grim joke on several levels (1183). I suspect the author was inspired by David Cronenberg's deliriously inventive film eXistenz (1999; strongly recommended), which imagines a biologically based, rather than silicon-based, digital technology.
I mention Cronenberg here as well because Boneland's technology is is also very disturbing. John Board, our protagonist/point of view character seems to be one of the few Americans in this alt.history who are, well, bugged by the bugs. He begins as a photographer, and the shutterbug version is even more intimate than the tech we know from our timeline (check Kindle location 176 for a sample). Our "hero" (because he isn't, really) sees his career implode, then restart on grim terms, and we follow him through death. Boneland is, in a sense, a biographical novel.
And that's what cost me a single star. Board is, well, fairly flat as a character. He lives in a kind of emotional suspension and worldly disengagement that sheds light on the world, but without revealing many of his depths. His main love interest, Mary/Louise Brooks, isn't that realized, and their relationship is pretty basic.
Board's uneasiness is a good proxy for the reader's. As the 20th century proceeds people tell us that the Guests are getting more humane and less scary, but culture seems to degrade, with dehumanization, growing warfare, and rape-themed reality tv (1758)
More on the world: Boneland plays with names. Most humans have object names, like Detective Shoe (242), Pete Spoon and Ronny Shingle (465), Henry Plough (675), Warden File (684), and so on. Conversely, objects have biological names, as Board lives on Sacrum Street (150) in the big Illinois city of Coccyx, formerly Chicago (1590). There are some fun altered instances of our world, like Taxi Driver appearing thusly:
The book contains a short story, "Close Enough", which lives in the same buggy, Guested universe. I'll leave it off this review since I'm focusing solely on novels.
Overall, Boneland is a fascinating, engaging read. The world is creative and worth reflection. I'm not sure it's really horror per se. Yes, there are scenes of violence, but they don't appear to elicit dread. Their disgust is more political, with a dose of psychosexual unease. I recommend the book for anyone interested in contemporary horror, and look forward to more Jeffrey Thomas.
Boneland is a curious blend of horror, fantasy, and alternate history. All three have a source in the arrival of strange beings on Earth during the late 19th century. Actually, there were two types of beings. First appeared the Guests, entities from far away in space, who could only manifest by meddling with human minds, leading to madness, violence, and possibly the first World War. After this, ah, embarrassment, the Guests sent an insect ecosystem, and this is where Boneland really shines.
You see, Thomas has these alien insects stand in for the 20th-century industrial era. The bugs serve as cameras, radios, telephones, televisions, advanced building materials, early computers (Kindle location 300), ocean liners (but not airplanes, 1628), and more. Their ecosystem evolves in parallel with the course of what we think of as technological innovation. Thomas has a great deal of fun (I imagine) with developing different insects for each need, giving us clever new forms. New human jobs and mutations appear, with persons paired with specialized bugs: Assassins who feed murderous imagery to their riders, Mediums ridden by brain bugs (example: 695). The titular Boneland is Hollywood, a nice grim joke on several levels (1183). I suspect the author was inspired by David Cronenberg's deliriously inventive film eXistenz (1999; strongly recommended), which imagines a biologically based, rather than silicon-based, digital technology.
I mention Cronenberg here as well because Boneland's technology is is also very disturbing. John Board, our protagonist/point of view character seems to be one of the few Americans in this alt.history who are, well, bugged by the bugs. He begins as a photographer, and the shutterbug version is even more intimate than the tech we know from our timeline (check Kindle location 176 for a sample). Our "hero" (because he isn't, really) sees his career implode, then restart on grim terms, and we follow him through death. Boneland is, in a sense, a biographical novel.
And that's what cost me a single star. Board is, well, fairly flat as a character. He lives in a kind of emotional suspension and worldly disengagement that sheds light on the world, but without revealing many of his depths. His main love interest, Mary/Louise Brooks, isn't that realized, and their relationship is pretty basic.
Board's uneasiness is a good proxy for the reader's. As the 20th century proceeds people tell us that the Guests are getting more humane and less scary, but culture seems to degrade, with dehumanization, growing warfare, and rape-themed reality tv (1758)
More on the world: Boneland plays with names. Most humans have object names, like Detective Shoe (242), Pete Spoon and Ronny Shingle (465), Henry Plough (675), Warden File (684), and so on. Conversely, objects have biological names, as Board lives on Sacrum Street (150) in the big Illinois city of Coccyx, formerly Chicago (1590). There are some fun altered instances of our world, like Taxi Driver appearing thusly:
This [poster], from 1941, was for [Howard] Hawks' Cab Driver, about a lonely and alienated WWIV vet who takes to driving a taxi at night. Though it ended with an extremely violent shootout, the film was unusually artistic rather than exploitative...
Filming the cab as it coasted shark-like through hellish mists of steam on back lot city streets had been a rewarding challenge for him.(1879)
The book contains a short story, "Close Enough", which lives in the same buggy, Guested universe. I'll leave it off this review since I'm focusing solely on novels.
Overall, Boneland is a fascinating, engaging read. The world is creative and worth reflection. I'm not sure it's really horror per se. Yes, there are scenes of violence, but they don't appear to elicit dread. Their disgust is more political, with a dose of psychosexual unease. I recommend the book for anyone interested in contemporary horror, and look forward to more Jeffrey Thomas.
June 6, 2018
Boneland, simply put, is one of the best books I have read in years. Thomas uses a wild, bugpunk, alternate history to follow the life of a man trying to cope with an increasingly insane world. Disturbing, intelligent, original, and all too relatable.
January 7, 2018
"... as if God had slipped into a coma and then death when we weren't paying attention."
As usual with Jeffrey Thomas, Boneland kicked major ass. He always writes somewhere in the shadowy in between places that overlap in horror, sci fi, and noir, and this book is no different. Set between the late 1800s and the 1950s or so, it takes place in an alternate history where some kind of alien intelligence that is completely bent on watching human cruelty gives mankind weird alien technology (mainly made out of giant insects!), and in exchange all the humans have to do is record episodes of violence and the aftermath on their special, disgusting cameras. The plot revolves around a man named Board, a crime-scene photographer, then convict, then cinematographer, as he grows up in the alien-augmented world and works his way along in it, never quite coming to terms with the ultra-violence the aliens seem to get off on. The book is dense with Jeffery Thomas's inimitable black humor and bleakness, and the ending, well, I won't give it away. But it was super satisfying. Christ this book kicked fucking ass, was fast and tight as usual, and as usual would have made a great Twilight Zone. Here are some of my favorite lines.
"Board sat up on the edge of his bed... and groaned again as his hangover uncoiled fully, like a poisonous cobra, or maybe a python unhinging its jaws to slowly swallow his brain whole."
"He heard a church bell ringing the hour, but though he wasn't listening to it closely he could swear it rang too many times."
"... Wasn't here to observe, with the piercing lens of his gaze, when we were abandoned to our own devices... as if God had slipped into a coma and then death when we weren't paying attention."
As usual with Jeffrey Thomas, Boneland kicked major ass. He always writes somewhere in the shadowy in between places that overlap in horror, sci fi, and noir, and this book is no different. Set between the late 1800s and the 1950s or so, it takes place in an alternate history where some kind of alien intelligence that is completely bent on watching human cruelty gives mankind weird alien technology (mainly made out of giant insects!), and in exchange all the humans have to do is record episodes of violence and the aftermath on their special, disgusting cameras. The plot revolves around a man named Board, a crime-scene photographer, then convict, then cinematographer, as he grows up in the alien-augmented world and works his way along in it, never quite coming to terms with the ultra-violence the aliens seem to get off on. The book is dense with Jeffery Thomas's inimitable black humor and bleakness, and the ending, well, I won't give it away. But it was super satisfying. Christ this book kicked fucking ass, was fast and tight as usual, and as usual would have made a great Twilight Zone. Here are some of my favorite lines.
"Board sat up on the edge of his bed... and groaned again as his hangover uncoiled fully, like a poisonous cobra, or maybe a python unhinging its jaws to slowly swallow his brain whole."
"He heard a church bell ringing the hour, but though he wasn't listening to it closely he could swear it rang too many times."
"... Wasn't here to observe, with the piercing lens of his gaze, when we were abandoned to our own devices... as if God had slipped into a coma and then death when we weren't paying attention."
May 6, 2012
As wiith Punktown, Thomas delivers another rich alternate history, this time rewriting the past. We experience a world transformed by insectoid aliens who insidiously influence humans from the 1910s through the 1960s. The pathetic protagonist's life is forever entangled with the living cameras he has the talent to operate.
Highly imaginative and laced with the dark comedy prevalent in much of Thomas' superb writing.
Highly imaginative and laced with the dark comedy prevalent in much of Thomas' superb writing.
February 24, 2017
Jeffrey Thomas is not an "easy" author for me, his writting is far from my comfort reading zone.But
I must admit that he has a lot of talent and originality and in the end, the books that I've read by him
are worth the effort.This novel is not exception.
It's a curious story that mixes fantasy and crime fiction with references to films of past century,
recommended if you are looking for something different.
I must admit that he has a lot of talent and originality and in the end, the books that I've read by him
are worth the effort.This novel is not exception.
It's a curious story that mixes fantasy and crime fiction with references to films of past century,
recommended if you are looking for something different.
April 28, 2016
It takes a weird fiction author to really do alternate history right. A lot of subtle but serious commentary on our relationship with history, entertainment, and offshoring the blame for our own problems here with some really cool-creepy and stark imagery.
July 6, 2010
I loved this book! Though I must say that it reminded me of the movie adaptation of William S. Burrough's Naked Lunch... You'll just have to read it to see why! And I highly recommend you do.
July 21, 2016
The only book I've read that mixes alternate history, body horror, bio-tech and sci-fi. Recommended for people with an interest in the weird.
July 17, 2021
“That’s some effed up [stuff] right there.”
December 27, 2017
Boneland is a neat little novel about the life of John Board, a photographer in an alternate history world where alien entities called The Guests offer mutated insects that function as equivalents of our modern technology, in exchange for showing them the acts of violence that humans are capable of. Thematically, the ultra-violence is very similar to Jeffrey Thomas's Punktown series. It works well as a world-building piece, as you get a view of how things change over the span of Board's life, but the plot leaves a lot to be desired. Instead of a coherent story, this book basically provides snippets of his life and the world around him. This isn't helped by the fact that Board isn't a particularly engaging character to begin with. One other (irrational?) annoyance I had was the fact that all the surnames of the characters were household objects (Board, Faucet, File, etc.) for no discernible reason, and without any explanation. Overall, it's a fun read, but nothing world-changing.
April 26, 2020
Vivid imagery, savage content. A visceral, tightly plotted reaf
Strong writing difficult at times to read. Solid plotting, good characterization. A novel about man's inhumanity to man, almost allegorical story following one man from childhood, through adulthood and to the grave. The main character is a moral being in an immoral, brutal world influenced by what appears to be an alien race. By the end of this book the reader has to wonder if the aliens are really just a manifestation of human consciousness. Perhaps even the subconscious of the main character, or perhaps in some way, he merely enables the aliens to influence mankind. This is a real page-turner, gripping and compelling. I read it I one setting.
Strong writing difficult at times to read. Solid plotting, good characterization. A novel about man's inhumanity to man, almost allegorical story following one man from childhood, through adulthood and to the grave. The main character is a moral being in an immoral, brutal world influenced by what appears to be an alien race. By the end of this book the reader has to wonder if the aliens are really just a manifestation of human consciousness. Perhaps even the subconscious of the main character, or perhaps in some way, he merely enables the aliens to influence mankind. This is a real page-turner, gripping and compelling. I read it I one setting.
January 12, 2022
This novella shows us a very interesting alternate history universe through the eyes of a cinematographer, using living technology to document this very violent and dystopian society.
If you can stand the very graphic (almost loving) depictions of murder, corpse defiling, and rape, you will enjoy this novel. However, if those things don't resonate with you (as they don't with me), best to avoid this one.
The e-book version comes with a short story that is an extremely graphic description of the Mỹ Lai massacre. Even if you made it through the novella, I'd recommend skipping it.
If you can stand the very graphic (almost loving) depictions of murder, corpse defiling, and rape, you will enjoy this novel. However, if those things don't resonate with you (as they don't with me), best to avoid this one.
The e-book version comes with a short story that is an extremely graphic description of the Mỹ Lai massacre. Even if you made it through the novella, I'd recommend skipping it.
July 25, 2017
Human, barbaric, horrific
Horrific fantastic exaggeration of mans cruelty to man. Do the Guests make victims of us or do we just use them as an excuse for barbarism. Were we just following orders? A very uncomfortable read, I couldn't put it down.
Horrific fantastic exaggeration of mans cruelty to man. Do the Guests make victims of us or do we just use them as an excuse for barbarism. Were we just following orders? A very uncomfortable read, I couldn't put it down.
January 14, 2022
Bloody, gory, visceral . . . and fascinating. A well-developed alternate history and one person's experiences in it. I wasn't sure at first, especially with how bloody it was described as, but it wasn't as bad as I expected, and I found Board more and more interesting as it went.
January 1, 2018
Creepy, Crawly Bugs
Interesting idea, but other than their voyeurism, the Hosts are completely unknown. Not on par with the Punktown books, or the Hades series.
Interesting idea, but other than their voyeurism, the Hosts are completely unknown. Not on par with the Punktown books, or the Hades series.
November 16, 2021
Insane, haunting. Buggy.
January 21, 2023
In the reverse of so many of the opinions that I expressed here, I liked the story (mostly) but hated the premise.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews