One reason that the Books of Horror Go To List has worked so well for me is that I hadn't read too many of the books on the list going in and not that many of their authors. I'd read two books: 'The Hunger' and 'Nothing But Blackened Teeth', along with one further title by Alma Katsu, Catriona Ward and Dathan Auerbach, and a couple by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Since then, I've added more by Stephen Graham Jones and Simone St. James. But then there's Christina Henry. I'd read more of her work than any other author on the list, but none of them had hugely impressed me. I enjoyed 'Lost Boy', 'The Girl in Red' and 'The House That Horror Built', don't get me wrong, but 'Near the Bone' is why she's on this list and that's because it's in a different class.

Mattie lives at the top of a mountain. Well, her name is Martha but her husband William calls her Mattie and, for quite a while, he's been her entire world. It doesn't take us long to realise that he is violent and controlling. He tells her on page six that "It's not your role to think". Music is sinful, so that's right out. She isn't allowed to read anything except the Bible. She's prohibited from the bedroom when he opens his trunk and from going down the mountain ever. Sex is her "daily duty" to give him sons; she's already lost three babies in the attempt. And, if it comes to it, there's also the Box.

Clearly, she's not having the best of time of it up there on the mountain with William. However, it seems that something else has joined them. It's Mattie who finds a dead fox, ripped apart but not eaten. Before long, they track whatever it is to its lair in a nearby cave, where there are stacks of bones and piles of organs. This is bear country, but no bear would do any of those things. This isn't the work of any of the regular animals that live up above the snowline in whichever state they're in. We don't get a lot of details. Just as William's clearly keeping Martha isolated, so Henry keeps us short on information. It's a solid approach.

As any hacker will tell you, though, information wants to be free, and the trigger for Mattie is the arrival of someone else again. He's a stranger on the mountain, roughly her age, and he thinks he recognises her. Sure, he mistakes her for William's daughter rather than his wife, which is telling in itself, but there's something about her that seems familiar. He's Griffin Banerjee and he's up in the mountains with his friend, C. P. Chang, and, somewhere, Jen, who's the third in their group of amateur cryptozoologists. They've heard stories and now they're investigating them.

All this provides a perfect storm for Mattie, who starts to remember things. William tells her that they're just dreams but we're automatically going to distrust anything someone that controlling says. However, we have nothing else to go on except the possibility that Griffin might remember where he recognises her from. Eventually, of course, he does, and that triggers escalations that I am happy to report continue to grow until the book's done. Some of the revelations that go with these escalations are obvious, ones that I expected from the very first chapter. However, others are more unexpected and deepen this story considerably.

Of course, there are multiple ways to read this. One is as a monster novel, because there's surely something on this mountain that isn't human and it isn't going to get explained away in scientific fashion. It's not a bear and it's not a rabid squirrel or whatever else another author might try to palm it off as. It's a monster and it's suitably monstrous. The other is as a human monster novel, because whatever's going on between William and Mattie is guaranteed to be just as horrific as the more traditional monster is doing in the snow and the caves. Both these approaches deliver the goods and, perhaps what's more important, they combine to do so. Mattie isn't merely in an awfully horrible situation, she's stuck between two of them.

I really can't say a heck of a lot more about this, because, as powerfully effective as it is, it's really a simple story at its heart and there aren't many characters, settings or subplots to distract from that. Not counting the flashbacks that Mattie starts to experience into her past before William, I believe there are only seven characters in this book, two of which aren't even human. We spend it all on the top of the mountain, which is presumably a tall and remote one, never venturing down into the town that's always floating beyond our sight in the background. It feels weird to suggest that it's a claustrophobic read, given that almost all of it unfolds outdoors, but it is. The world is a tiny place to Mattie and she isn't allowed to leave it.

What else I will add is that this is completely original. All three of the earlier Christina Henrys I've read were based on other properties or at least paying homage to them. 'Lost Boy' is a fresh take on 'Peter Pan', subtitled 'The True Story of Captain Hook'; 'The Girl in Red' takes a dive into fairy tales to give us a post-apocalyptic interpretation of 'Little Red Riding Hood'; and 'The House That Horror Built' might be an original modern-day gothic but one that's clearly inspired by Guillermo del Toro. Here, if there's anything Henry brought in with her, I'm completely unaware of it. This is a psychological thriller and a monster movie wrapped into one without any obvious homage to an example of either.

Henry has a whole slew of books to her name, but they aren't all horror. 'Lost Boy' and 'The Girl in Red' fit within her thematic 'Dark Chronicles' and arguably count as fantasy, as do her 'Chronicles of Alice' books. Both may well be trilogies rather than series, but 'Black Wings' has reached seven volumes and looks like urban fantasy. Other books are ghost stories, gothics or horror novels and that makes me wonder what she thinks of as her home genre. Certainly, this is the best book that I've read from her thus far, even if it's perhaps not representative. I should read more. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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