The Bone Key (Monette)

[cahn]

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!

Comments

[snickfic]

The Booth stories are far and away my favorite works by Monette. I love Booth so much. I too just want him to have friends! And a boyfriend! ;__; FYI she's continued to write about him, and there's a full listing on wikipedia including links to all the online ones.

Also, poor Kyle Murchison Booth cannot catch a break (well, except for that one guy Ratcliffe who is actually nice to him),

Unsurprisingly, Booth/Ratcliffe is the most popular ship in this very small Yuletide fandom. <3

[rachelmanija]

Me too. I love the Booth stories so much more than anything else she writes.

The standard of Booth fic is VERY high. You really can't go wrong browsing it.

[cahn]

I really love them, which is not something I can say about her other books! (Though I like a few of them a lot.)

Ahhhh I will go take a look sometime, that's great! (My fic-reading is way behind where I want it to be, grump.)

[snickfic]

Oh by the way, I dug up The World Without Sleep a while back (my library had the short story collection it was a part of), and IMO it's the least Boothian of the Booth stories, by far. Booth's insomnia gets so bad that he falls into a vision of a very Lovecraftian dreamworld with goblins and angels, and Booth ends up brokering a peace deal between them, kind of. It's very different in vibe from all the other Booth stories, and honestly it would have made more sense to me as a story about a completely separate character. OTOH if you like riffs on Lovecraft's dream world, it's good for that.

[cahn]

Oh huh! Well, my library does have the short story collection, so I guess I'll see. I think I could be OK with it, but it's the sort of thing I prefer knowing going in (so I'm not disappointed by expecting something different), so thank you! (I didn't really read rushthatspeaks' comments on the stories, as I was worried the post would spoil plot points.)

[cahn]

They are my favorite Monette too! YES to friends and a boyfriend for him! (I must confess that I find it a bit hard to imagine him actually being happy -- it's easier to imagine glimmers of hope or a little more contentment, hopefully on the route there!) I love him a lot too.

Ohhhhh yay thank you for that link!! :D :D

[skygiants]

I really enjoyed the Booth novella that came out last year and it definitely put The Bone Key high on my list!

[cahn]

Ohhhh that's right I remember you posting about it and thinking I should read it! I'll have to dig up that novella so I can talk to you about that :D