Book Review: "The Bones Beneath My Skin"
TJ Klune does it again, giving us a novel that is all about grief, love, and the terrible, aching beauty of being human.
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Warning: Full spoilers for the book follow.
I fell in love with TJ Klune last year when I read the four books in the Green Creek series, which showed me that I shouldn’t write off sexy gay romances between witches and werewolves. I love the fact that Klune is so committed to bringing all sorts of queer stories to life, and I also love how he has the ability to mine all sorts of rich and deep emotions. Reading his books I can really lose myself in his prose, particularly since he has a real knack for immersing us in the minds of his protagonists.
I knew, then, that I was going to enjoy his newest book, The Bones Beneath My Skin, and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s a beautiful and poignant tale of found family, of grief, and of learning what it is to be human.
When the novel begins, Nate has returned to the family cabin he inherited upon the murder/suicide of his parents. Upon arriving at this distant part of Oregon, however, he discovers two people there that shouldn’t be. One, the brooding Alex, is a former soldier, while the other, Artemis Darth Vader, is seemingly a little girl. As it turns out, there’s much more to these runaways than meets the eye. Art is actually an extraterrestrial who has taken over the body of a little girl, while Alex is guardian, who has bonded with her. As tends to be the case in such stories, they’re on the run from the US government and, soon enough, Nate is drawn into their world, his life changed forever.
What’s particularly remarkable about The Bones Beneath My Skin is the extent to which it feels fresh and new, even when the story it tells–of an alien who is taken into custody before being freed by well-meaning human companions--is one that’s been told before. Klune is just one of those writers that has a keen sense of place and character. While we’re almost exclusively inside of Nate’s head, we still feel as if we get to know Alex, too, in all of his brooding and tightly-wound complexity.
Nate, like so many of Klune’s other heroes, is quite a troubled young man. Rejected by his parents long before his father killed his mother and then took his own life, he managed to forge a career at The Washington Post before blowing it up thanks to some rather unscrupulous behavior regarding a junior senator. It’s thus small wonder that he finds himself easily swept up by these two mysterious strangers. And, as time goes by, he finds his heart being captivated by them, though in markedly different ways.
It’s clear from the moment they meet that there’s more than a little something between Nate and Alex. For all that the latter tries to hold himself aloof, he clearly feels the spark of attraction, and one of the novel’s great pleasures is watching these two broken men find love and happiness with each other. For her part, Art seems to relish teasing them both, nudging them toward their romance even when neither of them is willing to admit that he might have feelings for the other.
Let’s talk a little about Art, shall we? She’s one of those characters who is delightfully strange. In part, of course, this is because she’s an alien being who has been captive in a human body for several decades, but it’s also because she has only recently been released into the outside world. She’s prone to using the vernacular found in old western novels, which is both unsettling and hilarious. Simply put: she’s a magnificent literary creation, capable of both great destruction and great love.
And then there’s Peter. Formerly known as Oren, he was the human being that Artemis first inhabited before she was forced into the body of a new host, and our trio reconnects with him as the novel reaches its climax. Klune expertly captures a growing sense of dread, particularly on Nate’s part, since he senses from the beginning that there’s something not quite right about this man and the acolytes he’s gathered at his farm. As such, the novel perfectly captures the ambience and ethos of the 1990s. As someone who came of age during that decade, I appreciated the references to the Heaven’s Gate cult and its adherents, all of whom, like Oren’s acolytes, ended up committing suicide, in the belief that they would ascend to a new state of being thanks to a comet.
One of the other things that I love about Klune’s work is his adeptness when it comes to pacing. He allows the romance between Nate and Alex to slowly take shape as they set out on this little road trip across the country, fleeing from those who would enslave Artemis again and toward an uncertain future. With every mile they drive, they come closer together, the bonds of love and affection forging a relationship that is unlike anything that any of them have experienced. Just as importantly, it’s precisely this emerging relationship that provides both Alex and Nate with a path back from the grief that has threatened to swallow them whole. When it comes down to it, there really is nothing like the family that you choose for yourself.
Even now, after all of the stories of found family that I’ve read (including those by Klune), the whole concept continues to fill my heart with joy. I suspect that this is because we’re living in an era of profound backlash toward the LGBTQ+ community, when all of the gains that we’ve made in the past few decades are being unwound at a rapid pace. When the world outside becomes so inhospitable, It helps to have some sort of fiction into which we can withdraw.
In the end, the novel is about so much more than just an alien and her two protectors. It’s about the bonds that form between those who are faced with adversity, about the ways that you can forge a life for yourself even after the most unutterable grief. Given the extent to which we are all engaging in a collective form of grief at this exact moment, it’s more important than ever that we have work like Klune’s which, despite some harrowing and heartbreaking moments, still manages to be like balm to the soul.
At the same time, it’s also about what it is that really makes us human. There’s a particularly haunting passage near the end, as it becomes clear that Art is about to return to her own kind. Overwhelmed with emotion, she says that she has finally learned what it is to be human and that, in fact, there is nothing more human than a broken heart. Reading those words, I was reminded of Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, which similarly deals with a being that isn’t human being thrust into a mortal body, as a result of which she must now feel regret, something that no other unicorn has ever felt. I’m not sure why, but something about this phenomenon–of a nonhuman being forever marked by their experience of being in a human body–strikes me to my core. It’s devastating. It’s beautiful. It is, in a word, human.
Suffice it to say, then, that I loved The Bones Beneath My Skin. I love how, in the end, queer joy is allowed to once again triumph. I can only hope that, sometime in the not-too-distant future, our reality becomes a little more like fiction.