Winner of the World Fantasy Award. “You hold in your hands a book of stories that forced Brian McNaughton to write. Make no mistake: I don’t exaggerate. There’s a reason this book won the World Fantasy Award. The stories inside it are rich, fascinating stuff—creepy and unsettling and phantasmic. Imagine what Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings would have been like if Tolkien had tried to tell that story sympathetically from the point of view of the human denizens of Mordor and you’ll have the slightest sense of what you’re about to wade into—but only just a sense. These stories will make the same demands on you that they made on Brian: they will command and compel you, and fill you full of terrible wonder. And when you’ve finished them you’ll find yourself wanting more.” —Alan Rodgers
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
The Throne of Bones
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle.
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Imagine earthy Tolkienesque characters in a setting full of cemeteries, graverobbers, necromancers, corpse-eaters--even a huge labyrinthine necropolis. Imagine mephitic gardens where the sarcophage, selenotrope, and necrophilium bloom. Then throw in star-crossed lovers, crazed zealots, stalwart heroes, bloodthirsty renegade armies, hideous monsters, and likeable misfits. You've got just a hint of the wondrous and original visions in the dark fantasy world of Brian McNaughton.
Horror scholar S. T. Joshi, in the afterword to this collection of stories, notes the strong influence of Clark Ashton Smith, Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Greco-Roman decadent works such as Petronius's Satyricon. "McNaughton seems to have mastered one of the most difficult of literary arts: to draw upon the classics of the field without losing his own voice.... The world that McNaughton has created in this book is the world of the ghoul; and who knows but that The Throne of Bones will become the standard textbook for the care and feeding of ghouls just as Dracula has become that for vampires?"
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Osteocarpentry,
By
This review is from: The throne of bones (Hardcover)
Mr McNaughton in this book has managed to suffuse the worlds of his influences with enough of his own vision that it stands apart, alone, atop the hill built of the skeletons of works that came before him. It is not easy to take the characters and situations of his forebears, especially one Old Gent from providence, and give them your own voice. The tales in this book more than accomplish that goal. I read the book once, and couldn't believe that it was that good, so I had to go through it again. The second reading was done in ONE SITTING. Brian McNaughton has an excellent command of both literary idiom and character. His beasties always talk and act like one thinks they should. He has a way with an image that has to be experienced to be believed. I was told by reputable sources that this was a book I should own, as both a reader and a writer of Lovecraftian dark fantasy, and again those sources have been on the mark. This volume has replaced Masterton's PREY and Browning's RESUME WITH MONSTERS as the best recent volume of Cthulhu Mythos-related fiction I have found. To make a long story short, I bought the expensive hardcover edition, and am happy to have spent the money. A review earlier mentioned that Brian has more of these tales. I want them. Seek out and obtain Mr. McNaughton's fiction if you like horror, dark fantasy, or good writing in general. Thanks, Brian.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Graveyard feasts,
This review is from: The Throne of Bones (Paperback)
The fact that an earlier edition of this book got the World Fantasy Award for best collection of 1998 is one of the horror/fantasy genre's too-few hopeful signs. Brian McNaughton should have come to prominence a quarter of a century ago, when he published horror novels with sonorous, evocative titles like Downward to Darkness, Worse Things Waiting and The House Across The Way. These books were adroit, literate, and populated with unusual but thoroughly believable characters; McNaughton's publishers decided to overcome these handicaps by releasing them with titles like Satan's Mistress, Satan's Seductress, Satan's Secretary etc., and naturally they disappeared without trace. It's a dreary and all too familiar tale, but I mention it here as an optimistic example of the way in which good horror can sometimes rise from the dead. The resurrectionists in this case are Alan Rodgers and Wildside Press, who have brought to light the aforementioned novels as well as three collections, of which The Throne of Bones is the newest-written, the largest and the weirdest. It's also the most unified in place and theme: the place is a luridly macabre fantasy realm, a decadent civilisation of wondrous perversity which clearly borders on the lands of Clark Ashton Smith; and the theme is ghouls. However, although McNaughton shares (and somewhat surpasses) Smith's sense of black humour and has a similar, though less deliberately archaic, richness of style, he also has more interest in plot and none of Smith's occasional lapses into cuteness and obscurity. McNaughton is also admirably rigorous in setting out the details of life as a ghoul - evidently a much less simple business than the mere eating of corpses and the cultivation of malodorous personal habits. For one thing, a ghoul can assume the appearance and some of the personality of the owner of the flesh it eats, which can lead to considerable complexities. For another, McNaughton's ghouls are not only monsters, but characters (it is also fair to say that many of the human beings in his work are not only characters, but monsters), and as such they demand and eminently justify the reader's attention, interest and occasionally - dare I say it? - sympathy. That's one more reason why this is not a book for the faint of heart, the rigid of morals, or the overly scrupulous of stomach.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the best books ever!,
By kenvan@roadrunner.com (Ken VanLyssel) (Albuquerque, nm) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The throne of bones (Hardcover)
I bought THE THRONE OF BONES through a book club. I had never heard of it or Brian McNaughton before. I guess the cover art first attracted me. When I started reading, I couldn't put it down, and I found myself thinking about the book and the characters when I wasn't reading it. Brian McNaughton's writing is style is like nothing I have read before. His mix of fantasy, sex and humor is so very entertaining and unique. As I read, I realized the stories were self-referential, mentioning places and theologies that are expanded on in later stories, which makes the world, Seelura, seem deeper and more alive. After reading it I had to go back and read it again so I could see how the characters, cities and religions all fit together within his work. I was very excited when I read on the dust jacket that he has a whole chronology, history and map of his world. I hope these get published one day, along with more of his work, by a mass market publishing house so that everyone can go to their local bookstore and pick up his work. Until then, I will continue recommending this book to everyone I can.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Listmania!
|
|
So You'd Like to...
|
|
