Hammers on Bone

Noir can sometimes be hard to identify, but most readers are familiar with the tropes: the put-upon private investigator, the case that he can’t walk away from, the hunt for leads, the twists and double-crosses. With Hammers on Bone, we get all the aesthetics of a hardboiled detective story but also: Lovecraftian monsters. Noir stories lay bare individual and collective moral failings, and in adding eldritch horrors, the book further externalizes those ills, showing how monstrous humans can be.

Hammers on Bone by Cassandra Khaw is a novella that melds the hardboiled detective novel with Lovecraftian monsters. Our private… show more.

Khaw, known for their genre-spanning sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, does a terrific job flipping the script on many older cosmic horror tropes in this cosmic horror noir novella. In crisp, graceful prose we watch as the unknowable monsters threatening our hero (and his client) turn out to be human, and the powerful forces assisting them are the more traditional horrors. I love it when cosmic horror is presented in a way that lets imagination do the work, and Khaw delivers here--leaving mysteries intact, and letting the reader scare themselves.