The Bone Key (Monette)

4/5. Okay, let's get back to books. I've had very mixed luck with Monette/Addison, but I loved this. Apparently what I really wanted her to write was a series of linked short stories about a long-suffering, gloomy, extremely introverted and shy museum curator who occasionally encounters eldritch horrors, with a strain of homoeroticism that is sometimes very heavily subtextual and sometimes just plain textual??

Also, poor Kyle Murchison Booth cannot catch a break (well, except for that one guy Ratcliffe who is actually nice to him), partially because his early life was legit horrible (as you might expect of a Lovecraftian Henry Jamesian narrator) and partially because he basically always puts the most negative spin possible on everything (again... as you might expect). I think... I just want a fix-it now where there are just tiny slivers of hope for him! (Okay, I want a particular fix-it where he realizes his mom actually did love him and her mental health issues were not a reflection of her lack of love for him, omg. The stories are set in an era where it makes sense that he would come to the conclusions he does, but, argh!)

There is apparently also another very-hard-to-find collection of Booth stories which rushthatspeaks talks about here. I have no access to this, but I was able to find links to three out of four of the stories, and the fourth one is in another collection:
The Yellow Dressing-Gown
The Replacement
White Charles
The World Without Sleep -- in the anthology Somewhere Beneath Those Waves, which I have not read yet.

The three additional stories that I have read I also liked!

I read this so that I could read cenozoicsynapsid's Yuletide fic, an epistolary murder mystery starring Booth's co-worker Claudia Coburn, which is obviously extremely relevant to my interests, and of course the story is wonderful!