Wake The Bones by Elizabeth Kilcoyne is the story of Laurel Early, a college dropout who returns to her family’s rural Kentucky farm to work in the tobacco fields. When strange occurrences begin to happen, threatening the lives of Laurel and her friends, Laurel is forced to investigate her late mother’s connection with the paranormal.

Honestly, I didn’t love this book. This was described as a young adult horror novel, so I expected that this would be more tame than adult horror novels. In reality, this was more of a disjointed teen romance novel with elements of fantasy/horror. The romance between Laurel and Ricky fell flat. The characters weren’t realistic, and many of them seemed unnecessary to the story. I wanted more information about the demon haunting the farm, and how Laurel’s mother became involved with it in the first place.

With that said, Kilcoyne’s writing style is beautiful. Her atmospheric prose immediately transports the reader to a sweltering Kentucky summer.

Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press/Wednesday Books for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Wake The Bones, by Elizabeth Kilcoyne is the perfect book for a late summer, or autumn read. It has a moody atmosphere, young characters at a crossroads, and creepy supernatural elements. I loved the small town element, and young people just out of high school trying to find their way. The title refers to Laurel's ability to sense the final moments of an animal from touching their bones. But the title seems to go deeper than that. I took it to mean finding your place in the legacy of your family and community. Laurel and her friends are all in that moment when you decide where you want to (or need to) go with your life. For Laurel, it means dealing with the death of her mother, and her (possibly being a witch). For Isaac, it means fleeing a dangerous home situation. And for brothers Ricky and Garrett (who love Laurel and Isaac, respectfully), it means deciding what your willing to do for love.

This was a beautiful book with supernatural elements, and a "big bad" coming for the group. This could represent many things, and I loved that one could interpret this in a variety of ways. If you love horror and YA, you will really enjoy this book.

What I Liked:

Moody Atmosphere:

This small farming community in Ohio is one I have never experienced in real life. The people, young and old, work hard. They are up at dawn and doing manual labor like fixing fences, and picking weeds. It's backbreaking work, but Laurel and her friends are in it together, so they still manage to have a few laughs.

But, there is an underlying current of doom. The land is not as fertile as it once was. And Laurel has an unusual hobby. She is a taxidermist. She scours the land for the remains of animals who have died and brings them to life as still life sculptures. It's her way of connecting to the land.

Lauren also lost her mother when she was a small child. Did her mother kill herself? Or did she die trying to protect Laurel from an unspeakable Evil? Will the bones reveal the secrets of the land? Is her mother a ghost? Who, or what is the Evil thing that may be trying to kill Laurel?



via GIPHY

Diversity of Paths:

I liked that even though the main character, Laurel, drops out of college, her life is not over. For many people, college is just not for them. There was some sadness that she has to start over to find the right path. But Laurel always knows that her farm is where she wants to be. There is no real struggle to leave, which I found to be refreshing. One can make a life, a good life, anywhere. And some people feel a strong connection to where they grew up. So many times in YA, the characters can't wait to leave their small town. And some of these characters do feel that way (with good reason). But I really liked that the author presented a counterpoint.

Characters:

Laurel is still trying to understand her mother's death. This legacy comes with a heavy burden. her uncle has raised her, and she feels a deep obligation to help out at the farm. She also knows that her uncle is grieving too. So she feels like she can't talk to him honestly about her mom. This is hard for Laurel. She really has no one she can really talk to about all of this.

Laurel's friends will break your heart. She has three male friends who are also trying to figure out their life paths. Brothers Garret and Ricky are hometown boys all the way. They like where they live and have no desire to leave. But Garret is secretly in love with Laurel's other friend, Isaac. Garret and Isaac both want to be together, but how can they do that in a homophobic town? Isaac is sick of living in the shadows, so he desperately wants to leave to a larger city. Also, as his father is an abusive alcoholic, Isaac really needs to leave if he wants to keep himself safe. These are Laurel's "ride or die" friends. They believe Laurel when she tell them something evil is on the way. Even with all their tensions, they are always there for each other.

Story:

This story is one of growing into an adult, but also of dealing with the baggage of one's family, all with the backdrop of a supernatural suspense thriller. The group keeps finding grizzly dead animals around the farm. Is someone (or something) trying to mess with Laurel? Was her mother an actual witch? Could Laurel be, as well? There is evil all around, but also there is the earth, the natural healer. I loved that Laurel and her friends are so in tune with the land that they can sense something bad is coming. When it does arrive, it takes all of them to drive it away. There will be a cost, but not one I saw coming.

Trigger Warning for domestic violence & suicide

3.5 rounded up. This is a lovely little blend of fantasy, horror and a little bit of romance and to me it really works on all fronts. I loved all the characters and thought they were fleshed out enough for what was called of them - especially loved Isaac, I was always racing to read scenes with him in. I also thought the imagery in this book was insane and this interesting blend of gory and beautiful all at once. I really felt immersed in this novel. The only reason I'm swaying more to a 3.5 than a 4 is purely because I don't love reading YA and some books really tilt YA for me. I think if I was younger this would've been a solid 4 but based on other things I read it has to be knocked down a little.

If you read the description and it sounds like something you'd like I'd def check it out :)

Thank you NetGalley for an advanced copy of WAKE THE BONES by Elizabeth Kilcoyne. The best part about this book were the vibes. It had this desolate, hot, overgrown Southern atmosphere combined with somehow both macabre and green-witch vibes. It was so creepy in the best way. The main characters were older teens worn down by their rough lives and their small town they couldn't escape. Their relationships with each other, both platonic and not, were real and gritty and deep. I also loved how all the horror represented the MC Laurel's grief for her mother and how that connection made sense with the plot—not something that's always accomplished. I thought it was a well-done horror story all around.

This was a really interesting read. Atmospheric, spooky, and engaging. I did love seeing Appalachia represented.
I do think it lagged more than it should have at certain parts and was a bit slow. I didn’t connect with any of the characters.

Disclaimer: I received this book for free through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I can't seem to find a decent Young Adult horror novel. They tend to forget the goal is to scare people and they veer off into a contemporary love story. It describes some gross bone stuff. The author focused so much on building an atmosphere that the plot died along the way.

First things first, this is the first book I've ever read that deals with like bone magic which I found fantastic and I want to just consume all books with bone magic now. The woods and magic were awesome in this book and I was surprised to see the devil character in here but he was different than most things I've read with the devil in him, so I appreciated a new take on him and I loved that this brings him back to his powerful scary self. Now, something I struggled with was the characters. I thought the group dynamic was good but knowing that they were college age I was expecting more adult behaviors but they were still very young high school. It got kind of distracting for me. And then the big showdown was awesome and then the next chapter was set like in the future and I thought for sure I was missing some pages or something. But I do still love this cover!

Thank you to NetGalley and Wednesday Books for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

I have really been enjoying the amount of creepy, technically horror but not quite horror, books I have been reading lately. A Dowry of Blood, What Moves the Dead, and now Wake the Bones—it’s enough to bring joy to my little gothic heart! Unfortunately, Wake the Bones, while good, didn’t quite live up to its full potential.
Speaking first to what I liked. I loved the imagery in this book. The visceral, but beautiful way things are described had me absolutely enraptured in the same way that horror classics like Frankenstein and Dracula do. As someone who has studied both classic and popular literature, I am always keen when a modern author harkens back to the poetic and descriptive language of days gone; while also not going overboard, mind you. In that, I think Kilcoyne definitely found a nice balance.
However, one of the trappings of using that type of language is that you lose cadence. Instead of the narrative progression ebbing and flowing with the emotional onslaught of the plot—something very important in horror narratives!—it instead becomes a little monotonous. This stunts the immersion of the novel. A way to avoid this is to move from a third-person narration to a first-person one, and I so wish that Wake the Bones had done this. In my opinion this book would have been so much better if it had been told from a first-person perspective, either with a rotating POV, or a singular one focussing on Laurel.
As is, the novel is alright and I might recommend it in a few very specific cases, but it doesn’t stand out as much as it could have.

Thank you NetGalley and Wednesday Books for the e-ARC of Wake the Bones. If I could boil this down, I would describe it as Stranger Things meets The Raven Boys, but with the white-trash-dynamics of Outer Banks. The beginning feels fairly slow, but the intensity of the folk horror is pretty cool.

Wake the Bones

The Gist

Laurel Early is back on her family farm after flunking out of college, back to helping her uncle tend the tobacco fields and spending time with her best friend, Isaac. When weird things start to happen, she has to go back to the past to figure out how to save her future.

My Thoughts

Well, this is a weird one but I liked it! I love horror and I really enjoy when it has a small-town feel, and Wake the Bones has this in spades. The blending of magic into the everyday life of Laurel and her friends is so well done, it’s believable. The devil that took her mother is as creepy as they come and now it’s after Laurel and it will stop at nothing to consume her, and that imagery right there is terrifying. As a person who spends a lot of time outdoors, that first encounter gave me chills!

I love the themes of friendship and romance, along with acceptance that are addressed in the book. It adds to the story for me. I think when there’s love, there’s so much more to lose so it feels all that much more desperate (insert page turning) to make things right and good again.

Bailey Carr narrates this and as usual, she does a phenomenal job.

My thanks to @MacMillan.Audio for this gifted ALC and to @WednesdayBooks for this gifted DRC.

My main take away from Wake the Bones is how much like a horror film it feels. From the slow build-up to the bizarre folkloric monsters that appear, I could see each page scene-for-scene in my head. As much as the horror film-feel did wonders for the novel, it also let it down in not being quite as well done as I’d hoped. The eerie atmosphere quickly gave way to things that fell short of being truly scary, with some disjointed writing adding a level of confusion.

Nevertheless, Elizabeth Kilcoyne does an excellent job of writing an atmosphere bursting with creepiness and sweltering American summers. Despite never visiting the US, Kilcoyne brought the setting to life. The tobacco fields of the Early’s farm, Christine’s trailer and even Garrett’s truck were written as though lived in and very vivid indeed.

The plot of the novel was somewhat basic, and yet somehow too complicated all at the same time. Laurel is introduced as being able to read bones: she can touch a bone and see the last moments of its owner’s life. This unique trait, along with a penchant for taxidermy, makes Laurel Early an intriguing character. But this mystery is overshadowed when Laurel realises there is much more magic she doesn’t know, and desperately needs to in order to save herself and her loved ones.

This is where the confusion comes in. Laurel doesn’t really understand how to work magic, so neither do we. The act of casting spells is left, for the most part, to be rather mysterious and I only found this frustrating. It suggested a certain lack of detail that was disappointing given the quality of other aspects of the novel.

Wake the Bones is an enjoyable YA horror, that won’t offer too many nightmares. Many elements are very well written and the characters are all enjoyable for all their quirks, downfalls, and sweet spots. I do recommend this as a fun foray into the horror genre.

Content note: ‘Wake the Bones’ contains themes and scenes of domestic violence, homophobia and magic-related self-harm.

Thoughts

I liked this book. It was a lot slower than I anticipated. It took some time to build itself up. I didn't mind that, but I know some might. It definitely isn't the YA standard.

Pros
Pleasantly Grotesque: This book is macabre in just the right way. Follow the trail of oozing blood into these haunted woods, and you will find macerated bone murals. Laurel is a taxidermist, making art from the bones she takes from the woods, and she might just have a bit of bone witchery to her blood. The haunting itself drips with dark images of eldritch horror--all in all, this book embraces the grotesque as it spins this new Southern Gothic side of Americana.

Perspective Hop: Elizabeth Kilcoyne uses perspective shifts in the perfect way. Carefully switching between the cast of dead-end characters wonderfully builds suspense and foreboding. The characters are salt-of-the-earth, but they all experience life in different ways. And as their life starts to shift and change, that becomes all the more apparent as we get a chance to look through their eyes.

Christine: I mean, what's not to love about a grumpy gas station witch? Christine doesn't fit in this town, but she doesn't mind taking up a spot in it anyway. She's unapologetic, but she's also apathetic. You've got to push for her witchy insight if you want it. The fact that ghosts come to her for help only annoys her; she's got other things to deal with than dead people's headaches. I think she was a great addition and a unique voice to add to this tale.


Cons
Too Much Work Detail: Several years ago, I read and enjoyed Janet Edwards's Earth Girl, a sci-fi book featuring a team of student archaeologists excavating Earth's great cities after humanity's inevitable collapse. I recommended this book to my book club at the time, who also enjoyed it, though with one caveat. Many of the club felt that Edwards spends far too much time detailing the actual archaeological work--the dirt, the rocks, the meticulous provenance process. I had no such problem with the book, but then, archaeology is and has always been interesting to me--so much so that I studied it at a university level. Reading this book, I finally got a taste of what my friends meant about Earth Girl years ago. The details might not be excessive in this farm work, but they are indeed laborious. The sweat, the sun, the hornworms, the muddy boots--all of it sets the scene, but little of it was interesting to me. I'm sure others will have no such qualm, but it was just a little too occupation-specific for my tastes.

Lack of Panic: In the moment, when bony eldritch horror is reaching for young souls, there is certainly a bit of panic. But after an escape, all that panic--all that sense of urgency--fades away. Nothing felt urgent outside of each spooky scene. Nothing felt rushed. The whole story felt like it was idling, lazy in the summer heat of the setting. I needed more of a sense of terror. At least one of the characters had to be feeling it, right?

Old: This book is full of old themes and old souls. The characters don't feel young, burdened by adult problems as they are. They are, as Laurel's uncle often reminds them, adults. They're not spirited 17-year-olds posing as adults, and their story isn't snappy and fast like a lot of YA horror. This isn't a problem, per se, with Kilcoyne's book. It's a problem with the marketing. This book feels like an adult book. It doesn't feel YA at all, even though it is marketed as such.

Rating
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
7/10

Fans of Rory Power's Burn Our Bodies Down will enjoy this new, twisted interpersonal drama. Those looking for another side of supernatural horror to their iconic Americana after Ann Fraistat's What We Harvest will enjoy this new small down drenched in eldritch horrors.

I saw this book on Instagram and was immediately taken by the cover and the title.
It did not disappoint at all. What a debut!

The world building is fantastic. The sights, sounds and touch, all of it was wonderfully written to give you an incredible sense of what is happening.
The story is solid and the characters, while a little flat, were good.

My one problem was that there were times that I was confused about whose POV I was in. The chapters are not labeled but it wasn’t too distracting.

I also don’t need to have some elaborate story on how magic works in the book. I am fine with magic being magic and that’s it. Maybe others wouldn’t like that.

Overall, I recommend this book. I look forward to reading more from this author.

There are mentions of homophobia and abuse. Please read descriptions and any warnings.

Lush, horrifying, and atmospheric, this book is my new summer obsession!

The problem with southern gothic that I find is that its very easy to get lost in the weeds of the slow pacing and languid prose, but I thought this was a really successful balance. Sometimes the dialogue got a little bogged down, but overall a manageable read.

I was a little surprised that this is actually YA! Certainly for an older teen I'd say, more of a New Adult crowd in terms of content.

I will say that the plot felt a little disjointed at times, with uneven pull between Laurel's struggles with the farm, Isaac's desire to leave, and whatever Christine had going on.

3.5 stars. I don’t know if I’d qualify this novel as horror or sci-fi. Either way, it was definitely different. Laurel Early lost her mother as a child and has been raised by her uncle on the family tobacco farm. Her hobbies include taxidermy and the bones she’s working with have started to “come alive.” Apparently, Laurel has a bit of magic to her and there is an evil on the farm that her mother died fighting. Laurel and her friends are tasked with trying to defeat the same devil.

*Special thanks to NetGalley and Wednesday books for this e-arc.*

I did not finish this title. I stuck it out through about 80% of the audiobook but couldn't finish it. Definitely not my kind of book, which I thought would be more magic and less horror. I am not a squeamish reader but I felt like a lot of the things included in this book were gratuitous and didn't do much to advance the plot. Slow pacing did not help with this either.

My one positive is that the narrator was excellent and did a great job with the Kentucky twang.

4.25 Stars

Thank you to Wednesday Books and Netgalley for an arc of this book.

Wake the Bones is a Southern Gothic YA Fantasy that has Laurel coming home after dropping out of college and discovering evil and magic and ghosts lingering on her land that she hadn't noticed before. Together with her friends Isaac, Garrett, and Ricky, Laurel works to solve the mystery of the Devil that is haunting her land and what truly happened to her mother all those years ago.

This was a great atmospheric read! I listened to the audio and was really invested right away. It was easy to get drawn into the world of the story and the magic going on around Laurel and her friends. I also understood the plight of Isaac loving both loving and hating where he lived and feeling like he needed to leave to really be himself.

Laurel and Isaac were both really compelling and three dimensional characters. I wish that some of the other characters had also felt that way, but they felt a little more static to me. I wish we could have delved more into Christina and her magic because that part of the story really drew me in but it was so small.

Overall a really creepy and interesting read!

Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Death of parent, Body horror, and Blood
Moderate: Physical abuse and Homophobia
Minor: Suicide and Suicidal thoughts

Elizabeth Kilcoyne’s debut novel, Wake the Bones, comes with a paragraph-long trigger warning at its start as to all its disreputable contents. Having now read the book, I can’t remember what this young adult tome was trying to warn me away from. However, there’s a reason for the trigger warning and that has to do with the fact that this is a book meant for young adults between the ages of 12 and 18 — and putting the f-word twice into your book may be a cause of consternation for some parents. I’m kind of two minds when it comes to these types of warnings: I suppose if you’re squeamish, these points can guide you towards whether you’ll want to read the book or not. However, I also think they’re a little bit overdone: it’s as though the author or publisher is saying “look at how controversial this book is!” in a flagrant attempt for you to get to read it. And I’m reminded of the pseudo trigger warning that graces the opening of the film Cannibal Ferox. It was the sort of thing that promised so much blood and gore that I wanted to watch the film through my fingers. Except, well, by the time the film got going, I didn’t find it all that scary at all!

In any event, Wake the Bones is a YA horror novel that mixes up horror with confusion. It is very hard to tell what’s going on with this book. However, it does center around a 20-year-old-ish woman named Laurel, whose mother died sometime before in an apparent suicide. Laurel has decided to drop out of college, where she was studying to be a veterinarian, to instead work on her uncle’s tobacco farm in rural Kentucky — dabbling in taxidermy on the side. She’s friends with some of the neighourhood kids, including Isaac, a non-binary character who is gay, and Garrett, who is in love with Isaac but, unlike Isaac, does not want to leave Nowheresburg, U.S.A., behind anytime soon. Anyhow, as the characters go about their business, strange things start happening in the woods adjacent to Laurel’s uncle’s farm. Sooner than you can say the words “deer carcass,” the characters find out there’s a devil in the woods that wants Laurel. Why? I read this book and have absolutely no flipping idea why!

As you can tell, there were things about this read that had me wanting to throw my Kindle across the room. (I was reading the book as an advance e-galley.) I do have to be generous, though, and say that Wake the Bones is competently constructed. And by that, I mean that the whole point of Chapter 1 is to get you to Chapter 2 and Chapter 2’s point is to get you to Chapter 3. This whole thing is built like a car on an assembly line. It’s just got that kind of feel to it. And there are parts of this that are very well done, such as when a witch named Christine introduces herself — stealing every scene she’s in. (I kind of wish the entire book was written from her point of view.) I also must say that the book is original in its depiction of monsters and things that go bump in the night. Who would have thought that a skeleton made from different animal parts could be so creepy?

However, the book ultimately falls flat — largely because this is Kilcoyne’s first book and she’s still a novice in many respects. For instance, at one point Laurel is told that the only way to kill the devil that’s after her and her friends is to fight back with magic. At which exact same point, Laurel becomes some sort of magician on the spot. No long apprenticeships. No figuring out what to do. No, boom! She’s suddenly capable of using magic and defeating her demons. What the fudge? That’s not all that bothered me about the read. I’m guessing that Laurel and her friends are in their early 20s, but they act rather immaturely for their age. And so, I kept waiting for the devil monster thing that is hunting Laurel and company to start picking people off one by one. You will be disappointed to learn this (because this is a horror novel and I’m flagging this as a massive spoiler) but nobody dies in this book. Well, unless they’re already dead, and that’s another thing I could go off on. When Laurel tells her uncle Jay she can see the ghost of her mother, Jay just kind of accepts it in his own way. He doesn’t grab Laurel and peel off with her in his truck to the nearest psychiatric facility. Nope. Ghosts are matter of fact in rural Kentucky.

There’s probably a lot more stuff I could point out hating about this mercifully short novel. I could go on about the Isaac / Garrett romance. While it’s great to introduce young readers to queer fiction and characters, their story. is. boring. Honestly, it’s so two-dimensional and cardboard-like that any attempt at romance fizzles on the page. Again, you might wish that the devil in these pages was strong enough to kill off one of these characters just to spare readers from all the navel-gazing about the need to live beyond small towns and trite clichés about homophobic fathers. So if I have a trigger warning of my own it might be to advise young people to stay away from books like this. Not because they’re violent. It’s because Stephen King does this type of thing so much better (and, yes, with buckets of more gore than you’ll find here). Your best bet, because time and life are short, is to start at any one of the sixty-plus books he’s written. It’ll save you from having to piece together a broken Kindle because you just couldn’t take a hackneyed plot and flat characters in a terrible novel that is only redeemable because it is put together like a Ford. In other words, this book will trigger anyone who gets angry when a halfway decent concept is so poorly executed — as it is here. Avoid this unless you’re really, really curious. It stinks.

This book has potential of being something very spooky, however for me it felt flat. The characters weren't super interesting there were too entangled with their personal dramas and the spookiness ended up being the backstory.

Thank you NetGalley for an ARC of this book! I really enjoyed the premise of the book and thought it was super intriguing but I found the characters rather boring and somewhat unlikeable but overall this was a pretty cool read!