The Bones Beneath My Skin by TJ Klune

Prolific science fiction and fantasy author TJ Klune tried to go it alone in 2018. After being told by his publisher that his latest manuscript, The Bones Beneath My Skin, was “too weird” he decided to self-publish. His afterword to this book documents how hard that process was. Fortunately. Klune found another publisher and after huge successes like House on the Cerulean Sea and In the Lives of Puppets, he has been able to get The Bones Beneath My Skin re-released. Because it turns out that there are plenty of readers out there who appreciate Klune’s form of weird.

It is hard to talk about The Bones Beneath My Skin without talking about its antecedents. The book draws on a deep well of stories involving UFOs, close encounters, first contact and aliens on the run. This includes properties like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET, Paul, Resident Alien, The Space Between Us, The X-Files, Roswell, Project Blue Book and even Star Wars, to name a few. And yet, Klune still manages to bring his own brand of magic to this oddball, gender fluid, found family narrative.

When The Bones Beneath My Skin opens, Nate Cartwright is running away from his life as a journalist in Washington DC. In the truck he inherited from his parents (who had disowned him when they discovered he was gay), he heads to the remote family cabin in Oregon only to find two people already living there – an ex-marine called Alex and a 10 year-old girl who calls herself Artemis Darth Vader. Only the little girl is not actually a little girl, and it turns out the pair are being hunted by shadowy government forces. The rest follows some fairly standard alien-on-the-run tropes, including a pause with a seemingly welcoming but creepy cult.

Klune leans on Artemis’s wise but naïve responses to the world to deliver some zingy dialogue and slowly builds the inevitable relationship between Nate and Alex. There is quite a bit of action but it is handled well and explains why Artemis might have chosen the name that she did. While Klune explored many of these ideas to much better effect in the very different In The Lives of Puppets, The Bones Beneath My Skin is still enjoyable fare, peopled with engaging protagonists and driven by a whole lot of heart.

The Bones Beneath My Skin by TJ Klune

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80.0/10