New story! "The Bones Beneath" is now out at Podcastle

 

I have a new story out this week! “The Bones Beneath” is now up at the wonderful Podcastle, and you can either read it there or listen to Tatiana Grey’s beautiful narration. It's perhaps the darkest thing I’ve published yet. I also think it’s one of my best.


This story grew out of a lot of things. A slushy, dreary Midwestern spring, and a sudden image of glowing bones. A cloud of swirling thoughts and ideas from the last several years, struggling to find form. There are a number of real-world historical inspirations for the fictional world and history in my story. The Chinese Cultural Revolution is the heaviest and most obvious inspiration. But there are a number of others, from different countries and societies, and from different time periods stretching up to the modern day. And from all sides of the political spectrum.

 

For me, one of the key passages in my own story is this one, where the young protagonist is struggling to make sense of her world:

 

She didn’t understand the fear and hate building all around them. The frenzy of paranoia, the gleeful denunciations, the thrill of righteous violence. She didn’t understand how people — both those at the top and those below — could manipulate all this for personal power.

 

Another large inspiration for this work was Maria Haskins’ brilliant horror story, “Cleaver, Meat, and Block.” At first glance, Haskins’ zombie story is very different from mine. But they’re both about societies struggling in the aftermath of great violence and trauma, where people are forced to live peaceably alongside those who terrorized them and murdered their loved ones, in the name of “moving on.” Haskins’ story lingered in my mind, making me think of all the real-world examples of this.

 

There’s a little bit of wish-fulfillment in my story, as a writer friend pointed out to me the other day. Magic provides a possible route to unearthing dead voices. To providing testimony, to forcing a society to see what it’s done. Fiction can provide a catharsis that’s difficult to find in real life. I think that’s why so many of us read it, and why some of us write it.  

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