Rating: 
Summary: Graveyard feasts
Review: The fact that an earlier edition of this book got the World Fantasy Award for best collection of 1998 is one of the horror/fantasy genre's too-few hopeful signs. Brian McNaughton should have come to prominence a quarter of a century ago, when he published horror novels with sonorous, evocative titles like Downward to Darkness, Worse Things Waiting and The House Across The Way. These books were adroit, literate, and populated with unusual but thoroughly believable characters; McNaughton's publishers decided to overcome these handicaps by releasing them with titles like Satan's Mistress, Satan's Seductress, Satan's Secretary etc., and naturally they disappeared without trace. It's a dreary and all too familiar tale, but I mention it here as an optimistic example of the way in which good horror can sometimes rise from the dead. The resurrectionists in this case are Alan Rodgers and Wildside Press, who have brought to light the aforementioned novels as well as three collections, of which The Throne of Bones is the newest-written, the largest and the weirdest. It's also the most unified in place and theme: the place is a luridly macabre fantasy realm, a decadent civilisation of wondrous perversity which clearly borders on the lands of Clark Ashton Smith; and the theme is ghouls. However, although McNaughton shares (and somewhat surpasses) Smith's sense of black humour and has a similar, though less deliberately archaic, richness of style, he also has more interest in plot and none of Smith's occasional lapses into cuteness and obscurity. McNaughton is also admirably rigorous in setting out the details of life as a ghoul - evidently a much less simple business than the mere eating of corpses and the cultivation of malodorous personal habits. For one thing, a ghoul can assume the appearance and some of the personality of the owner of the flesh it eats, which can lead to considerable complexities. For another, McNaughton's ghouls are not only monsters, but characters (it is also fair to say that many of the human beings in his work are not only characters, but monsters), and as such they demand and eminently justify the reader's attention, interest and occasionally - dare I say it? - sympathy. That's one more reason why this is not a book for the faint of heart, the rigid of morals, or the overly scrupulous of stomach.
Rating: 
Summary: Fancinating
Review: Yes, it's morbid. Yes, it's bizarre. Yes, it's Brian McNaughton at his fearsome best.If you enjoy reading stories with a sick twist, then you don't want to miss The Throne of Bones. This book is not one long story; rather, it's a series of short stories that are loosely tied together. I wouldn't call this a "horror" book... nor would I call it straight fantasy. There is some necrophilia, and a bit of ritual killing that might be a turn-off for those readers who might be offended by such things. The writing is mature and well-developed, giving the book an almost scholarly feel. I suspect that if a less well-read author attempted to write this book it would be considered trash. As it is, however, McNaughton manages to make some queasy material into a feast fit for a gourmet.
Rating:
Summary: Fancinating
Review: Yes, it's morbid. Yes, it's bizarre. Yes, it's Brian McNaughton at his fearsome best. If you enjoy reading stories with a sick twist, then you don't want to miss The Throne of Bones. This book is not one long story; rather, it's a series of short stories that are loosely tied together. I wouldn't call this a "horror" book... nor would I call it straight fantasy. There is some necrophilia, and a bit of ritual killing that might be a turn-off for those readers who might be offended by such things. The writing is mature and well-developed, giving the book an almost scholarly feel. I suspect that if a less well-read author attempted to write this book it would be considered trash. As it is, however, McNaughton manages to make some queasy material into a feast fit for a gourmet.
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