A review by wealhtheow
The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth by Sarah Monette

3.0

A collection of spooky stories, connected by the presence of a stuttering bibliophile main character. The very scariest were "Bringing Helena Back" (just from the title you know the terror that awaits, but Monette freshens the revenant story by using a POV outside the revenant and the lover that won't let her go), "The Venebretti Necklace" (because ghosts haunting basement libraries with uncertain lights and a dangerous metal staircase hits far too close to home), and most terrifying of all, "Wait For Me." (Dead little girls are scary. Mirrors that show things that aren't there are scary. Faces without eyes are scary. Combine all of those into a single, generation-long haunting? I will pee my pants.) Others delve deeper into Booth's character and history, like "The Bone Key" and "The Green Glass Paperweight." I quite liked Booth, who is almost incapacitated by social situations but brave and absolute in the face of necromancy and ghoul pensioners. And I loved the dream logic by which the horrors often operated; it worked for me in a way few ghost stories manage to. A very solid collection.

(I should mention that I do not read the horror genre, as a rule, and so to veterans of that area these stories may seem less fresh and scary. To a fantasy fan like myself, they were on the verge of being too scary to enjoy.)