BONE OF MY BONE, latest of Johanna van Veen's sapphic historical fiction/horror tales

BONE OF MY BONE
JOHANNA van VEEN
Poisoned Pen Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Bram Stoker Award–nominee and USA Today bestseller Johanna van Veen unveils a sapphic folk-horror tour de force—perfect for fans of The VVitch and The Salt Grows Heavy. A skull's grin is eternal…

The year is 1635.

Sister Ursula, a young nun fleeing the ruins of her convent, and Elsebeth, a sharp-witted peasant, escape a band of marauding soldiers and disappear into the Bavarian forest. War scorches the land, and no one survives it alone. Amid the devastation, they find something in the arms of a dying man: the gilded skull of a saint.

It is said that if you reunite the saint's skull with her body, a wish will be granted. Desperate for salvation, and each with secret desires of their own, Ursula and Elsebeth follow a ragged map across the blighted countryside. But darkness follows them. A necromancer, drawn to the relic's power. The saint herself, whispering at night. And as the lines between blessing and curse blur, the women must face a harrowing the magic they seek comes at a cost.

At the journey's end, they'll face an impossible choice—one that could tear apart everything they know… or bind them to each other forever.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: There is a period in History with no war. Statistically there must be.

This is not it. As usual, Religion...and religion...are at the heart of the Thirty Years' War that Author van Veen chose as her backdrop for the love between Elsebeth the canny formerly-Protestant peasant and Ursula the Catholic nun. Their meet-cute involves marauding soldiers and an unlikely act of salvation from the usual fate of women in a war. A bond formed then is unbreakable, and it helps that Elsebeth has already lost her religious faith. An odd sort of reward comes to the women for acting on human decency and female solidarity: the discovery of a first-class "holy relic" that both women understand the mythology behind (follow both links to see why that isn't unusual or anachronistic).

At that moment we leave the ordinary world behind. This is now a supernatural tale of pilgrims on a quest to perform an action for a reward. The background is war, violence, and its usual consequences for humanity caught up in it. That's the horror, and as I've said before, the kind of horror I can relate to; the supernatural horror so common in books is not scary to me because I don't believe in the supernatural or, maybe more accurately, in its innate power to act independently on reality. The women must protect the relic they've been charged with safekeeping from a necromancer who wants to use the thing to Perform Eville Acts.

It could as easily be a greedy bastard wanting to disassemble the adornments of the relic for onward sale and profit. Likewise the women's desire to protect the relic could as easily be motivated by their own need to survive, thus making returning the relic to its institutional owners for a presumably significant reward makes sense. Would change nothing, really, but the supernatural edge is used very well to heighten stakes that I myownself found entirely high enough. This is the origin of my half-star reduction in the rating: artificially (to my mind) inflating the stakes.

I genuinely enjoyed the women's love story more than any of the silly supernatural stuff. I got really invested in Ursula and Elsebeth reaching the understanding that their quest gave them the very best gift of all gifts in each others' love. It's a lovely process to follow no matter what other story beats an author uses around it. The love of same-sex couples will always garner my supportive interest in a story (see my reviews of Nicked and Recital of the Dark Verses for other examples). My joy at the women falling in love outweighed any reflexive eye-rolling at the notion of necromantic powers being able to create a kind of zombie-slave of poor Otto, for example.

I'm all in on recommending the read to my fellow queers. Author van Veen is a stylistic writing monadnock. Her eye for what makes a story compelling to a reader, not just a genre addict, is second to none. If you worry about gore and scariness in horror fiction, ,I'll tell you that I found all the trappings of horror less worrying than the awful limning of humanity's viciousness that's inherent in any story set in wartime.

Religion, the big public-facing institution, and its private-practice cousin, religion, come off poorly in this story. So y'all know going in. It's the genesis of the war being fought after all.