A Bone in His Teeth: a semi-review
February 4th, 2025
i need to read more books. so about 2 weeks ago i went to my public library to pick up a few things, and also return a book that i never ended up reading… oops. i wasn’t looking for anything in particular, so i just scanned the fantasy/sci-fi section for about 15 minutes. i ended up picking up Dune by Frank Hubert, because i have a friend who’s very into the series. the other title i picked up was A Bone in His Teeth, a fantasy/romance “with horror elements” by Kellen Graves. i was hooked by the gorgeous cover art before even reading the summary on the back(it absolutely SCREAMS monster fucking queer sexuality). after reading the first paragraph of the summary, i decided to pick it up without looking up any reviews of it as i normally would. about 5 chapters into this 34 chapter novel, i decided i really wanted to write a review about it. but now that i'm all the way through it... i don't want to write about it. i feel like maybe instead screaming into the void about my feelings about this novel. so, here goes.
first, a little backstory about me. when i was younger, i LOVED the romance genre. it was all i ever wanted to consume. i think there's a big reason for that: i felt comforted when inserting myself into a character, and having that character experience unconditional love. i've had a very hard time feeling loved in my life, ever since i was little. i remember waking up from nightmares when i was 8 where the main scary thing that was happening was that no one loved me. i remember thinking that my family members never actually meant it when they said they loved me; i genuinely thought that as soon as i wasn't around that they would say bad things about me and be happy they didn't have to keep up the facade any longer. romance was my comfort. i fantasized about inserting myself into stories and experiencing that unconditional, undeniable love for myself.
since i was about 16/17, i stopped being as interested in romance. i moved on. that's for reasons i'm not sure of yet. i no longer cared about slash fic or romance novels, or romantic dramas, or anything with love at the center of its themes. i've barely consumed anything romance since and been interested or affected by it(i kindof hated heartstopper, sorry not sorry). so someone, PLEASE TELL ME WHY i was so affected by A Bone in His Teeth's romance???
i should introduce the story, now, for this semi-review semi-screaming into the void about this random obscure book that i don't even know how it got into my public library:
Alba Marsh is a 20-something year old employee victim of the Warren Sailing Company, a sailing business that treats its employees pretty badly, engaging in workplace safety violations, constant surveillance, and even kidnapping and forcing new hires to work against their will(see shanghaiing). his father is dead, and his mother is this fleeting, mysterious figure that Alba is on a mission to find, as she disappears often and without warning. one day, he receives a telegram that he assumes to be from his mother that gives cryptic hints as to where he should escape to. this is when the story begins.
i should specify, right now: i reccomend this book, especially if you are a gay or bisexual transmasculine person interested in a dark romance novel, and if you can handle fanfiction levels of writing technique. i will in fact be spoiling this book in this blog post, so please do yourself a favor and do not read the rest of this if you are interested in reading this novel. another thing i want to specify: i am NOT claiming that this book is well-written. in my opinion, the writing is very... clunky, amateur, and MAN does the author love run-on sentences. i mean this with all the love in my heart: its written like fanfiction. i've read a lot of slash fanfiction in my time on this earth, and i can roll with the punches, but it's not for everyone.
okay, on with the rest of the plot:
the telegram that Alba recieves from that is supposedly from his mother(spoiler: it is in fact from his mother) reads in just a few short words:
"WICKIE. BLUECASTLE. FULL MOON." (page 6)
almost as soon as Alba receives this telegram does he run away from the fish stall he is working at in his hometown and a chase scene ensues. so, is the chase scene well written? no... not in my opinion. which honestly made me wanna stop reading, but i knew the novel was about a gay transmasc dark romance, which made me wanna push through(and im glad i did). through the chase, Alba discovers the meaning of the telegram: there is a job listing for a wickie(term for lighthouse keeper) at a place called bluecastle, so Alba snatches the job up and rides the ferry to a little village called Moon Harbor.
an aside: there is a very vague sense of the time that this story takes place in. after a lot of googling "when was {blank} popular/invented/happening?", my best guess is that it takes place in the late 1800s, early 1900s. this could have been solved through a simple date on the telegram, but no, i had to do a bunch of googling to make an educated guess about this. i shouldn't have to say this but your reader shouldn't be confused about the time and place in which something is happening, unless that's the intent, but i don't think it was with this. i assume that the story is happening before WW1 because there is no mention of any war during it, though i acknowledge the author might not have also gave much of a shit about the politics of the era they were writing about(despite, in my big fat opinion, it being important to placing the story).
once arriving at Moon Harbor, Alba meets the most respected man in town: Eugene Michaels(i found this to be a dumb name and i will not explain why). he's the warmest out of all the townsfolk; the rest seem to want to avoid talking to him at all. he shows Alba to the lighthouse and its shack, and explains that they use a special kind of oil to light the lantern's wick. this becomes important later.
a few days into his stay, one of the "debtors" catches up to Alba in his shack. in a very unsatisfying 2-paragraph scene, Alba ends up killing the guy and tries to dump the body in the sea. this is where he meets a male siren, who attempts to use his siren's song to ask Alba very nicely to please figure out what happened to the rest of the merrow of Moon Harbor, who have all disappeared except for this one siren. A few pages and another badly written struggle with a completely nondescript "demon" later(seriously, there is no physical description of this demon, which left me fairly confused for a lot of it), Alba is placed under a curse by the siren in which he cannot leave the town lest his body corrodes into a big pile of salt.
we find out this siren's name is Eridanys in another scene where he shows up on top of a drunk Alba in his human form(because they can do that apparently), and Eridanys is just straight up butt naked, complete with an observation from Alba that his junk is above average size. honestly? i did not have a problem with this. is it corny? yes. cliche? a little. written like horny fanfiction? ohhh yes. but, i have no notes. let him be naked, i says!
a few days later or so, Marco, someone who works for the Warren Sailing Company, visits Moon Harbor on separate business, before realizing that Alba is there, and this dude is absolutely evil. Alba comes up with an idea as Marco begins to rough him up: he can lead him to the lighthouse where Eridanys is, pretending he's got something that could erase his debt to the Warrens forever. But instead of giving jewels or money or any material thing, he can just feed Marco to Eridanys. and it works! problem solved :)
the romance that sparks between them from when they first meet is not a slow burn by any means. they end up fucking halfway through the novel, albeit it was under certain conditions that take a while to explain, but i'll try to do so succinctly: when a merrow and a human "mate", that human becomes that merrow's "shore-caller", and allows the merrow to traverse onto shores that are usually magically protected from merrow, like the town of Moon Harbor is. in return, it becomes the merrow's duty to offer their shore-caller protection whenever they need it. Eridanys proposes that they "mate" so that he can venture to Moon Harbor to hopefully figure out more of what's happened to his kin, while also pinky promising Alba that he won't eat him afterwards. so, they end up fucking on the shore of the lighthouse while Eridanys is in his siren form, complete with 2 penises! it's hard to say whether this classifies as monsterfucking, since there are some purists out there who think the monster can't be too humanoid in nature, else its just kinky sex. but i'll call it monsterfucking, idgaf. that scene was also very good, in my humble opinion...
fast forward a little and in the Moon Harbor's forest clearing at midnight during the new moon, they figure out what's happened to the rest of the merrow: they've all been massacred, harvested for their parts, including their fat, which turns out to be the special oil that lights the lighthouse's wick. yeah, pretty fucked up and insane! there's plenty more twists where that came from, though.
fast forward a little later again and they also find out that Eugene Michaels(the guy with the stupid name) is evil actually! fucked up! he goes to threaten Alba, and Alba absolutely SNAPS in a very strange scene in which he bashes his head open with a teapot, and begins... having a meltdown over it? need i remind you this is the 3rd person he's killed in this novel so far (im counting the guy he fed to Eridanys), so the way that he's losing his shit this time in such a profound way is beyond me. the novel tries to say that its because he's being threatened with going back to being a victim of the Warren company, but like... he was threatened with that literally every other time too? i dont know. it just didn't make sense to me. alas my brain may be too puny and small and wrinkly to understand what the author was going for.
at this point, Eridanys and Alba's romance has developed to a point where they are actually becoming seriously romantically involved, and its no longer to get something from one another. the romance between these two isn't very "dark". Eridanys frequently swears to Alba that as his shore-caller, he will protect him and always come when he needs his protection. this is where my mentally ill brain starts to short-circuit.
i want to explain myself a little more here. my obsession with romance was not restricted to media, but it was also something that took over the way i thought about my daily life. i'll admit it: i was the cringe kid who could only ever think about dating people and placed my whole self worth on whether i was dating someone or not. it was cringe, but also it was just sad, because i know exactly where this came from. i had very emotionally absent dad and a physically absent mother growing up, along with an abusive step parent. this is why i never felt loved as a child, and why that feeling still creeps to the present. romance and dating was a way to compensate for the fact i didn't get parental love. boohoo me i guess...
i just... i didn't expect myself to still feel so affected by the romance of the story. there's something so satisfying in feeling like someone wants to possess you, own you, even. there's something so attractive about the idea in feeling like someone else wants to protect you & call you theirs. it's a little disappointing and a little embarrassing at the same time to admit that. i can't help but feel: was the romance actually good? or was i so captivated by the ideas swirling around my mentally ill brain that i was entranced by a medicre love story? i'm not a romance person anymore, am i?
anyways... i wanna talk about the ending. because i have more feelings about that.
a lot happens! so much that i'm not gonna explain everything that happens, but only what i think i can. first, Alba figures out that his mom has been dead this whole time - she appears to him in the form of a desecrated zombie corpse(she's the nondescript demon from earlier), and when Alba figures out, its honestly pretty heartbreaking. from the gashes on her body they figure that the townspeople of Moon Harbor murdered her. then, Josiah Warren, the head of the Warren Sailing Company, makes his way into town for Eugene Michael's funeral, who he's apparently related to in some way. his company finds Alba there and captures both him and Eridanys. once they both are able to escape the company's grasp, Alba decides to do the normal person thing and burn the entire town down. he throws a lantern into the trees and a fire breaks out. then he steals a shotgun with a bunch of shells and storms to wherever Josiah is and in a very suspenseful (and not badly written as i thought it would be) scene, Alba murders the fuck out of him.
then, in a divine act, the entire town becomes swallowed up by the sea, with Eridanys saving Alba from drowning just in time.
since finishing the novel, i've contemplated the ending a lot; it feels very much like a fantasy - not the genre, but the type you dream about - where you kill all those who have wronged you. and i think my initial response is to pull away from it, but my second response is to want to root for the idea. though, i think, Alba can't be all butterflies and rainbows afterwards - it'll take him months to mentally recover from what he saw and did. but at the end of the day, it was an act of freeing himself from oppression. i think that's what makes me want to root for it - because sometimes acts of violence are the only means to achieve that end, no matter how grisly(see the claims adjuster from this past December). And Eridanys couldn't do it for him (this time) - Alba had to do it for himself. It's fucked and horrifying, though it never claimed to not be that way. to take these matters, though, into your own hands, is to bear heavy consequences, whether internal or external. which makes me wish for a second novel to go with it.
that's another thing i wish to see - for Alba to become more sensitive after the trauma he's faced and the horrific things he's seen. i also just wish for a character to relate to - who's as emotionally sensitive as me - who has faced depression and anxiety & the depths of those conditions. i crave that type of representation, & i want to see it done well, too. that's another thing that i think attracts me to certain types of romance media so much, is their ability to portray a suffering character as loveable. ill give you one last cringey confession: i daydream that i'm loveable, despite my suffering. i daydream it because i don't believe it.
i think i like being able to see at least a piece of my own suffering represented in something, but also, that i feel i'm not alone in my own suffering. i think that's one of the most important parts of it. it's self-indulgent, sure, but it's what feels right to me. i want a story about someone with anhedonia. i want that person to be sensitive, & clinically depressed. and then i want the story to show that they are loved & loveable anyways, despite their illnesses, struggles, and dismally low self-esteem.
i know it's not socially acceptable to have made so many strange and depressing confessions about myself and my mental health. but ever since i was 18, i realized that expressing myself so openly and tenderly would mean something to someone. so this is not me trauma dumping. take this as a gift from me to you, a stranger.