The Bone Mother

Pros: delightfully creepy and/or unsettling vignettes, real photographs, fascinating mythologies

Con: no frame story to bring the disparate bits together

This is a collection of vignettes by people who have had supernatural experiences of some sort or are themselves supernatural creatures. Each story shows a snippet of life. There's little description or detail, but it's not required. I enjoyed piecing some of the stories together as the collection went on, though there's no frame story giving them the feeling of being a cohesive whole. The publisher's synopsis for the book is basically the frame story the book itself lacks and needs in order to give a sense of cohesion to the collection. I read this in ebook format and hadn't read the synopsis in months, so wasn't able to benefit from the information it gave. At the very least there should have been a wrap up story that tied things together better.

Most of the stories are fronted by a real photograph from the Costica Acsinte Archive. A few stories have hand drawn illustrations instead.

While I was familiar with a few of the creatures described, most of them were new and quite fascinating. It would have been cool to get more details about them, but again, the stories are more about ambiance and the feeling of dread than about describing things in detail. In this way, not knowing what the creatures were in some ways enhanced the horror based on the limited descriptions that were given.

Several of the stories are by people who grew up and lived in the three Eastern European villages, the rest are by their descendants. At least one story took place in Canada, and another in the United States.

On the whole I enjoyed the collection. A few of the stories were genuinely terrifying, while most were joyfully creepy. I would have liked a proper conclusion or frame story tying everything together better, but it's definitely worth picking up.

One thing that I absolutely loved about this work was Demchuk's ability to create and sustain a mood of unease and horror throughout the different stories that make up The Bone Mother. It's hard to do that consistently across different stories in an anthology like this, so kudos to the author for that!

On the whole, though, I found it hard to connect to the stories. Many of them were just too short - there was no time to establish the characters in a way that made their fates interesting. I think I would have enjoyed this more if it had fewer stories that were more fleshed out.

Eastern European style monstrous folktales, short stories, light horror, much creepy. paired with archival photos of real people and some illustrations of those Russian nesting dolls. I like the photos better, esp when they show decay. but I'm an archivist so go help preserve them at http://colectiacosticaacsinte.eu