A spine-tingling thriller by New York Times bestselling author TJ Klune, about a 10-year-old girl with an impossible power, her father, and an unlikely stranger, who come together to confront the dangerous forces that want her at all costs. A strange story of family, love, comets, and bacon. Perfect for fans of Stranger Things.

In the spring of 1995, Nate Cartwright has lost everything: his parents are dead, his older brother wants nothing to do with him, and he’s been fired from his job as a journalist in Washington DC. With nothing left to lose, he returns to his family’s summer cabin outside the small mountain town of Roseland, Oregon to try and find some sense of direction. The cabin should be empty. It’s not. Inside is a man named Alex. And with him is an extraordinary little girl who calls herself Artemis Darth Vader. Artemis, who isn’t exactly as she appears.

Soon it becomes clear that Nate must make a choice: let himself drown in the memories of his past, or fight for a future he never thought possible. Because the girl is special. And forces are descending upon them who want nothing more than to control her.

This is an intriguing book not least because it has been previously self-published by the author in 2018 when his previous indie-publisher rejected it as being a bit too ‘weird’, and now – in this edition – is being re-released by TOR.

It is easy to see how the publishers envisaged this as a book ‘perfect for fans of Stranger Things’ with its enigmatic 10 year old Artemis Darth Vader, avariciously devouring pulp cowboy fiction and enthusiastically embracing all aspects of American popular culture and fast food cuisine.

There are other comparator works that it reminded me of that I have tried to embed in a spoiler format – highlight with care.

There are (SPOILERS)

Chocky by John Wyndam

E.T. (1982)

The Host by Stephanie Meyer

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

The Last of Us (especially episode 3)

The key difference between Klune’s work and Stranger Things lies in the protectors that the mysterious central child character has gathered around herself. Rather than a quarter of nerdish RPG-ing adolescents, Art acquires a mismatched pairing of differently disillusioned older men. There is Alex the grizzled war veteran determined to return Art to her ‘parents’ in the face of fierce opposition from the militarized agency who want to continue ‘studying’ Art in a less than congenial confinement. And then there is Nate, a reporter –  sorry a journalist, he’s very insistent on that point –  drifting anchorless and rudderless after being cut loose by the only job he ever wanted and left abruptly orphaned by the murder-suicide of the parents who had long since rejected him for his ‘life style choices’.

The plot’s tight focus on these three characters limits the scope for too many inventive twists – as Klune describes it in his afterword

“The Bones Beneath my Skin is an action movie in book form, perhaps the most action I’ve written in a book that didn’t involve werewolves.”

The plot braids together threads of suspicion, threat, flight and – when necessary – fight, as it migrates from its opening cabin in the woods setting through a road movie sequence to a climactic denouement with more than one kind of bad guy. Despite the ever-present sense of foreboding, The Bones Beneath my Skin has the same kind of reader-reassurance that one gets in a romance novel – to wit there will be a happy ending (more than one kind in fact). Indeed, there is a large slice of Art-mediated romance in this sci-fi story. (What, I wonder, is the corresponding neologism to Romantasy for sci-fi-romance? Er… Scfi-mance?!).

However, that certainty that all will be well, that all must be well, doesn’t deprive the book of narrative tension about how that ‘well’ will be achieved, or even what ‘all’s well that ends well’ might look like.  There were times when a sharp one paragraph line ‘Until Havre, Montana’ was enough to make me scared to click on to the next page and it’s a testament to Klune’s story telling that were several moments I had to put the book down and brace myself before reading on.

Art’s endearing strangeness, the fresh eyes – and taste buds – she brings to things as diverse as cowboy fiction, stone skipping, bacon and bison make her an effective lynchpin for the story – the knowing child who is somehow in charge of the adult men she has gathered about her. Klune avoids gifting Art with a kind of precocious maturity that one might expect with the experience and talents she has compressed into a ten year old body. Unlike Stark Holborn’s genetically engineered child general Gabriella Ortiz from Ten Low, Art retains a sense of innocence and wonder alongside some quite earth shattering powers. However, this innocence is no glib authorial sleight of hand, but a credible reaction to Art experiencing a very different kind of physical existence. The poet William Blake decried man’s imprisonment in a physical body that separated him from his divinity but – in Art’s ingenue experience of corporeality, both the mundane and the exquisite – Klune offers something of the inverse perspective. We are, after all creatures driven by basic processes of chemistry and electricity. Our emotions part of a feedback system of thought and physiology, our senses informing and moderating the understanding our minds make of the world. For Art the experience of being physically human is itself a humanising process and something of that wonder bleeds through to Alex, to Nate and to the reader.

Alex and Nate, both very different by upbringing and deeply suspicious by recent experiences, are inevitably initially cast as enemies. But theirs is the only possible romance thread in the narrative – although Klune does well to make it seem an impossible turn of events for most of the story. The obfuscation is helped by the fact that – Art inspired interventions aside – we only see the story through Nate’s eyes. Alex is so bleakly taciturn he makes the famously laconic Calvin Coolidge sound garrulous.* Nate’s grief is complicated by the estrangement from his family –  after his parents stumbled in on a tryst between Nate and his then boyfriend. The parental disownment is poignantly addressed, though it was the interaction with his brother in a phone call that hit hardest, when the brother asks

“Why?”

“Why didn’t I tell you?”

“No,” his brother had spat. “Why are you like that?”

Klune’s prose flows smoothly with settings brought vividly to life,

There was a sign, barely visible behind a gnarl of greenery, trees and bushes growing wild.

And as Alex spoke and Art slept between them, Nates eyes glazed over and the stars above melted around them, streaking brightly toward the Earth as if they were falling.

There are some plot points that might fray a bit under too close examination. The motivations and actions of the various bad guys seem a little illogical – not so much giving the runaways enough rope to hang themselves with as gifting them a rope ladder and promising to count to several million before coming after them. I mean there’s extending an experiment and there’s incompetent carelessness (see also Chernobyl). Nonetheless plenty of high action and tense drama does ensue.

Which is all by way of saying this is a pacey narrative of sci-fi adventure and desperate flight that frames a more fundamental exploration of  being human, of love and of being a human in love.

The Bones Beneath My Skin is out today! You can order your copy HERE

*as Wikipedia tells it here “Although Coolidge was known to be a skilled and effective public speaker, in private he was a man of few words and was commonly referred to as “Silent Cal”. An apocryphal story has it that a person seated next to him at a dinner said to him, “I made a bet today that I could get more than two words out of you.” He replied, “You lose.” However, on April 22, 1924, Coolidge himself said that the “You lose” quotation never occurred.”

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