Brian McNaughton - The Throne of Bones

[andydecker]

Brian McNaughton - The Throne of Bones (Wildside Press 2000, Original 1997, Tpb, 286 p)

Content:

Brian McNaughton and the Stories That Compelled Him: Rich, Phantasmic, Creepy as Sin - essay by Alan Rogers
Ringard and Dendra
The Throne of Bones
The Vendren Worm
Meryphillia
Reunion in Cephalune
The Art of Tiphytsorn Glocque
A Scholar from Sythiphore
The Retrograde Necromancer
Vendriel and Vendreela
The Return of Liron Wolfbaiter
Afterword (The Throne of Bones) - essay by S. T. Joshi



As a child I was told not to gather souvenirs from the cemetery, but it was hard to determine where our overgrown gardens blended with the overgrown fringe of Dreamers' Hill. I had found skulls that clearly lay on our property. If Mother permitted me to collect them, although she would shudder and urge me to find a healthier pastime, why shouldn't I pick up skulls that lay in plain sight a few steps farther on? If it was right to uncover relics with the toe of my boot when I glimpsed them protruding from the earth, why was it wrong to seek them actively with a shovel and crowbar? The inability to make such fine distinctions has forever been my undoing.
- The Throne of Bones

While Brian McNaughton's work is rather small and the most known may be books like Satan's Love Child,  this is where he really shines. The Throne of Bones is a fantasy in the vein of C.A.Smith, which isn't a pastiche but a fully realized work. It is a marvelous tale of ghouls, necrophilia, worlds under the cemetary and monster-sex. The other stories here are much shorter and maybe a bit uneven, nevertheless they have the same atmosphere.

It's not easy to cause a stir in Sythiphore, where people go naked in the streets and make love in plain view, liekly as not with close relatives, but Tiphytsorn Glocque did.

- The Art of Tiphytsorn Glocque

[dem bones]

I'm a fan of the Satan trilogy, particularly Satan's Mistress. Have read several of his short, "nasty tales" in various Dziemianowicz-Weinberg-Greenberg '100...' anthologies, not quite as powerful, but, from your synopsis, this collection looks tempting for the title story alone.