Full review available on my blog 10th June: https://inkandplasma.com/2021/06/10/near-the-bone/

Thanks to Titan Books for the eARC of this book. It has not affected my honest review.

Content Warnings: death, violence, gore, physical and verbal abuse, implied rape, kidnapping, murder, child abuse.

I ended up listening to the audiobook of this on release date, having had it preordered as soon as the links dropped. I highly, highly recommend the audiobook for this one. The whole atmosphere of the book is unbelievably unnerving. The narrator, Lisa Flanagan, does a fantastic job. Her characterisation of Mattie is really good and the whole story is really engaging as she tells it so well. It’s a quick listen, especially as once I started I couldn’t even think about stopping until I’d finished the whole story.

The way that Mattie’s past unfolded is played out spectacularly, and leans into the unnerving atmosphere as I found myself helplessly predicting what was about to happen with absolutely no way to fix or change it. William was completely and utterly unbearable. I spent most of my time reading this book muttering under my breath about how much I hate him. It’s a lot. This book is dark and delves into a lot of awful topics, including frequent discussion of abuse and reference to past rape, but I do feel like they were handled with as much sensitivity as could be expected for a horror novel.

I wasn’t expecting the fantastical elements to kick in in the way that they did, and ho boy did they kick in hard. There’s something terrifying about getting halfway through a book and feeling that everything is okay. When you get that ‘ending’ feeling in the middle of a book, you just know it’s all going to go horribly, horribly wrong. And it did. In the end I loved this book as much as I’ve loved all of Christina Henry’s previous books, and while I adore her retellings (and I’m looking forward to Horseman a LOT), I have been really enjoying the non-retelling horror she’s been writing!