Book 6 for my 2025 goal of 30 books for the year! I’m off to an absurdly good start.

Sometimes it takes something very simple to draw me to read a book. In the case of I Believe in Mister Bones (2024), by Max Booth III, it took two simple things. The first is the excellent creepy cover, done by the ever entertaining Trevor Henderson.

The second is the subject matter itself: a creepy supernatural skeletal being known simply as “Mister Bones.” I’m a sucker for animated skeletons; heck, one of my original book reviews on this blog was of the super-obscure gothic novel The Animated Skeleton from 1798. This review, incidentally, led to my friendship with the folks at Valancourt Books. Also, when I was in college, ages and ages ago, I wrote a short horror story called “Old Bones” that was about a creepy supernatural skeletal being itself! So a novel about such a being is instantly going to intrigue me. I agree with a comment in the novel: “I’ve just always thought there’s not enough spooky skeletons in horror.”

And I Believe in Mister Bones did not disappoint! I read it in a couple of days, and read the last few chapters in one sitting to see how things would turn out. It is a clever, unsettling, and interesting tale of the supernatural.

Daniel and Eileen have been running the small press Fiendish Books in Texas together for years, and this is their biggest year yet. They’re planning on ten publications for the year — an overwhelming amount — and also running their own Fiendish Book Festival for the first time. With that amount of work, they are not open for submissions, and when Daniel first receives an email with an entire book draft posted in its body, he drops it right in his email trash. But something about the message, and its subject line, “DO YOU BELIEVE IN MISTER BONES?” comes back to him, and he soon reads the full novella-length draft.

It presents as a series of reported encounters throughout the years by various people with a supernatural entity named, of course, “Mister Bones.” Mister Bones is summoned by someone breaking a bone while thinking of it, and the reward for doing so is to have it claim your bones, one by one, as you sleep and replace them with unnatural rubbery substitutes. The ultimate fate of the victim is madness and death.

The novella, if that is what it is, is poorly written, but something about it captures Daniel’s attention, and he finally opts to contact the mysterious sender of the draft. This leads to a cryptic and horrifying video chat, and in the aftermath Daniel breaks his wrist while thinking of Mister Bones.

He soon finds himself experiencing bizarre nightmares every time he sleeps, and his body starts to feel alien to him. He quickly comes to believe that there is something real in the story of Mister Bones, and that he is heading towards a rapid and gruesome end. Can he find a way out of this curse before it is too late, and what is Mister Bones in the first place?

One thing that immediately struck me about I Believe in Mister Bones is how rich with detail Booth’s writing is. The novel begins with Daniel and Eileen at a local horror-themed event in a local mall, and the run-down mall and the convention minutiae are described with realistic precision. This is probably not surprising, because Max and Lori Booth run their own small press, Ghoulish Books, out of Texas, so a lot of the details are certainly autobiographical! The attention to detail persists throughout the book, and it is well-crafted and never tedious.

The book overall is a slow burn; we spend a lot of time learning about Daniel and Eileen as strange events gradually build up (with a few shocks along the way). We also learn some of the details of the Mister Bones book draft as we go, helping to build the sense of weirdness and dread.

The structure of the book is exceedingly clever, with one major unexpected twist about 2/3rds of the way through that shakes things up significantly. The revelation of the genesis of Mister Bones itself is quite imaginative, intriguing, and creepy, and to me serves as a commentary about our modern post-truth electronic age of misinformation; this has become even more relevant in the months since the book was published.

This is the first book I’ve read of Booth’s; I’ll be intrigued to check out more of their earlier work in the future, as I became a believer in I Believe in Mister Bones! (Okay, that was kinda cheesy, but I really did enjoy the book.)