Fun and Fraught: A Review of Bone Music

Bone Music (2018)
Written by: Christopher Rice
Genre: Science Fiction
Pages: 455 (Kindle)
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer

Why I Chose It: Bone Music was part of the Kindle First Read selection for February, and it looked interesting. I’d read The Snow Garden way back in 2002, out of rampant curiosity — Anne Rice’s son also a writer? I found that book… all right. It wore its influences a little too heavily on its sleeves, but I filed Christopher Rice away as a writer to come back to later. Then I forgot. So when this showed up in my choices, I read the first few lines of the premise, shrugged and said “sold.”

The Premise:

There’s more than one way to stoke the flames of revenge…

Charlotte Rowe spent the first seven years of her life in the hands of the only parents she knew — a pair of serial killers who murdered her mother and tried to shape Charlotte in their own twisted image. If only the nightmare had ended when she was rescued. Instead, her real father exploited her tabloid-ready story for fame and profit — until Charlotte finally broke free from her ghoulish past and fled. Just when she thinks she has buried her personal hell forever, Charlotte is swept into a frightening new ordeal. Secretly dosed with an experimental drug, she’s endowed with a shocking new power — but pursued by a treacherous corporation desperate to control her.

Except from now on, if anybody is going to control Charlotte, it’s going to be Charlotte herself. She’s determined to use the extraordinary ability she now possesses to fight the kind of evil that shattered her life — by drawing a serial killer out from the shadows to face the righteous fury of a victim turned avenger.

Girl raised by serial killers? Exploited by her birth father? Okay, that sounds interesting. I like serial killer novels, which probably says something terrible about my psyche, but there you have it. I particularly like books that poke at the serial killer trope from another direction.

And probably right now you’re thinking, why is this a Spec Chic review book? Maybe you did the same thing I did, skimmed the premise and made up your mind yay or nay by the time you got to the phrase “frightening new ordeal.”

See that next little line there: Secretly dosed with an experimental drug, she’s endowed with a shocking new power —

This book is a superhero story! I’m almost sorry to tell you that, because my discovery of that fact after skipping that info in the blurb, was an excited 0.0 !!!!!! as I hit that segment of the book. Really, most of my reactions to various scenes in this book could be summed up as !!!!!!

It’s a lot of fun is what I’m saying.

I’m going to do the best I can to avoid spoilers, but people’s perception of a spoiler varies, so best to be wary.

Discussion: A few years back, I went to see Lucy, the ScarJo, Luc Besson science fiction thriller. I went in with no expectations and thought after the first few segments, “Man, I am going to love this.” Spoiler: I really really didn’t. I spent a lot of the movie hate-texting to a friend. (Don’t worry, the theater was deserted.)

Rice’s book Bone Music gave me that same thrill: I am going to love this. And you know what? I did. He managed to keep things moving, exciting, and reasonably plausible for the vast majority of the book.

His near-debut novel, The Snow Garden, felt too familiar and suffered from easy comparisons to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Elizabeth Hand’s Waking the Moon. Bone Music also shows a lot familiar influences, but where The Snow Garden felt derivative, Bone Music mines the tropes and twists the results to good effect. This is a super-hero book. It’s also a thriller. And full of mad scientists. And some romance. And a little bit of mystery.

Some things I particularly liked:

The beginning is tense and swift. Charley has changed her name to get away from an obsessive stalker and thought she’d left him safely behind her. But someone’s just given him the information he needs to break into her secure compound. The reader learns this while the heroine remains ignorant, which builds tension. She’s confiding in someone who the reader suspects is the stalker’s ‘inside man’, and every decision she makes while talking to the inside man ratchets reader tension tighter. It’s a tiny master class in how to make small decisions really matter.

The characters are all interesting and decently fleshed-out. They may in fact be the most emotionally intelligent characters I’ve read in a long while, willing to dissect their own thinking. That sounds like it would be irritating. Somehow it’s not; it’s satisfying to see them figure out why certain things upset them. Why they made the decisions they did. And why they might fall back into the same mistakes. I loved that Charley stayed the focus, no matter what. Her male friends are often freaked out, but it’s still all about her, not about her stopping to reassure them.

I loved how Charley made decisions that aggravated me, then two pages later, think, I made a mistake. That wasn’t right. This whole thing was sketchy. What have I done? Rice took a weakness, hung a lantern on it, and turned it into a strength. How many of us (especially women) have left a situation that we went along with and afterward thought, no, that wasn’t right… that wasn’t appropriate. We doubt ourselves in the moment, but not after the fact. And that is thematic to this whole book — the ability to think clearly when it’s most needed.

The superpowers work so logically that I loved them. I loved the specificity of how and why they were triggered, and I loved that Charley spent a lot of time practicing these triggers, until the reader intuitively understood how they worked. And when we finally understand how those powers work, Rice flips the script and shows us the downside of these powers in a single sentence that makes the reader say of course her life is in danger now, of course!

(There may or may not be a tiny plot hole in the premise for why these powers work for Charley and not for any of the previous subjects, but I haven’t decided yet. Someone else should read this book just so I can discuss it!)

And most of all, Rice can really write. It’s been 14 years since I read The Snow Garden, and one of the reasons I kept him vaguely in mind was because I’d enjoyed his writing then.

A couple of examples, trying to avoid any plot relevance:

A character summed up:

Days off were for other people. People who didn’t have life plans. People who didn’t use wipe-off pens to turn one window of their dorm rooms into a running list of both daily and weekly tasks and objectives. (pg 180)

Another character moment:

Maybe she’s been springing for pricier duds ever since the California Association of Black Lawyers named her lawyer of the year. Whatever the reason, she looks way more out of place in this so-called safe house than Charlotte does. Charlotte finds that comforting. It’s a sign neither of them really belongs here, which is a sign they won’t have to stay for very long. (pg 93)

Since you already know Charley doubts herself at a pivotal moment, here’s a piece of that scene.

She stood up the minute Dylan handed her the pill.
It was a reflexive move on her part and she’s not sure why she did it.
Seconds before, Dylan had been leaning toward her, through the several feet of space between his chair and hers. Maybe their proximity became too much for her, or maybe now that she has the pill in hand she wants to run from the office and swallow it in private before she loses her nerve. (pg 44)

There’s just a nice level of flow and specificity to his writing that pulls the reader along. And I don’t generally like books told in present tense.

Is it a perfect read? Well, for me it comes awfully close. There are a few pacing issues in the middle when the team is coming together. Charley proves her new abilities to her friends more than once and deals with the repercussions more than once. This area seems to be marking time until Charley makes her next big plot decision. There is also the inevitable burgeoning relationship break-up moment that slows things down (though is nice enough for character illumination).

When I talked about Tim Pratt’s The Wrong Stars, I praised his ability to coin a phrase for his worldbuilding. Christopher Rice is a solid writer, but… he lacks that knack. It is way harder than people think!

Charley likens her power to feeling bone music. I’m sure for some people that’s going to be immensely evocative, but for me it felt clunky. And every time she used her powers, she referenced that phrase again, which made me twitch.

As an infamous child, she was given the nickname The Burning Girl, which… I also didn’t find evocative. I get its linguistic origin, but it’s just not tripping off the tongue.

Likewise, the mad scientists of this book describe the experiment failure as the subject going “lycan,” which… I just didn’t buy. Neither of the scientists seemed to be SFF geeks enough to have that word/concept in their go-to vocabulary.

I thought the intimacy of the book suffered from the late entrance of a powerful CEO who wants to strike a bargain with Charley, but that action also set up the sequel so…. I can’t object too much?

I liked Bailey, the hacker, but he was definitely one of those distant god-like hackers who could do anything, though Rice did his best to flesh him out, even if we never see him on the page.

In conclusion: Overall, this was one of those reads where you sit down, hoping for some mild entertainment, and find yourself glued to the book, resentful of anything that comes between you and it. I’d recommend it to anyone who liked superhero origin stories, or mad science giving people improbable powers, or serial killer novels with a lick of the fantastic.