Hammers on Bone by Cassandra KhawMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is another of the recent crop of Lovecraftian Mythos updates, this one set in London and starring (if indirectly) Shub-Niggurath. It's a taut, fast-paced novella about a hard-boiled detective who is hired by a kid to kill his stepfather. Needless to say, the detective gets more than he bargained for.
Cassandra Khaw is a fine writer. Her pacing is good, she creates the atmosphere of this story very well, and she has a knack for unusual metaphors and similes. For instance:
Croyden's a funny place these days. I remember when it was harder, when it was chiselers and punks, knife-toting teenagers and families too poor to make it anywhere else in grand old London, when this body was just acres of hurt and heroin, waiting to stop breathing. Now Croyden's split down the middle, middle-class living digging its tentacles into the veins of the borough, spawning suits and skyscrapers and fast foot joints every which way. In a few years, it'll just be another haunt for the butter-and-egg men. No room for the damned.
Of course, this being the Lovecraftian Mythos, the aforementioned tentacles figure prominently, along with eyes, blood and gore. However, Khaw practices admirable restraint along those lines--I've read far worse. The only thing that rubs me the wrong way is the casual misogyny of John Persons, our human/not human detective. This fits in with the noir tropes, but I still didn't like it.
All in all, this is not the best novella I've read this year, but Cassandra Khaw is a writer to watch.
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