Not Even Bones

Nita is a little bit too used to seeing death. Most nights she goes to bed after a nice, soothing evening of dissecting the body of an “unnatural” so her mother can sell the parts on the black market. But one night, after her mother brings home a live subject from one of her expeditions, Nita starts to wonder if she can handle watching him slowly cut up and sold off. When she helps him escape, she finds herself kidnapped and held at one of the black markets to which she and her mother had sold their own wares. Nita begins to wonder who it is that sold her out. Was it her mother? Was it her father? Was it some rival unnatural hunter?

While trapped in a glass cage, Nita comes face to face with a zannie—a supernatural creature known for feeding off the pain of others—with whom she can’t help but feel a strange connection. When things go full topsy-turvy, Nita and the zannie are forced to team up in order to escape the death market and find their way to safety (if such a thing can be said to exist for either of them anymore.) Using her own unnatural abilities for self-healing and body manipulation, Nita grapples with her place in the food chain and her existence as a villain in the world, but perhaps one with slightly less questionable morals.

Nita and her zannie companion, Kovit, are fully developed, three-dimensional characters that bring depth and complexity to what could otherwise be a simplistic slasher-style narrative. Nita’s place in the world as both an unnatural—someone or something classified as having supernatural abilities—and as a dealer of unnatural body parts makes her crisis of morality that much more complicated and interesting to watch. At one point, she directly states, “I’m so very good at taking people apart. But that’s because they’re not people. I can’t do it when they have a name or a face.” Similarly, Kovit’s need to survive off the pain of others seems to cast him as purely villainous, but even he has lines he refuses to cross.

The layers of moral ambiguity and acceptance of monstrous identities are fascinating here. In one scene, there is a bizarre juxtaposition between the two discussing their monstrousness while also attempting to discuss the concept of dehumanization. It is, in many ways, a fascinating examination of the layers of complexity inherent within human beings, set against the disturbing backdrop of a black market of body parts, discussed by two self-proclaimed monsters.

Not Even Bones is a deliciously dark and twisted story in the vein of Dexter and True Blood that will captivate young readers with an affinity for the supernatural and the morally ambiguous. Filled with action and adventure, death and destruction, and characters who refuse to deny their roles as villains, this emotional rollercoaster of a book will be sure to thrill and delight younger horror fans.