Hello and welcome to today’s blog post, today I have the pleasure and honour of participating in the “Into Bones Like Oil” blog tour from Meerkat Press!
INTO BONES LIKE OIL by Kaaron Warren
RELEASE DATE: 11/12/19
GENRE: Dark Fantasy / Paranormal
SUMMARY: In this gothic-styled ghost story that simmers with strange, Warren shows once again her flair for exploring the mundane—themes of love, loss, grief, and guilt manifest in a way that is both hauntingly familiar and eerily askew.
People come to The Angelsea, a rooming house near the beach, for many reasons. Some come to get some sleep, because here, you sleep like the dead. Dora arrives seeking solitude and escape from reality. Instead, she finds a place haunted by the drowned and desperate, who speak through the sleeping inhabitants. She fears sleep herself, terrified that the ghosts of her daughters will tell her “it’s all your fault we’re dead.” At the same time, she’d give anything to hear them one more time.
Now, it takes real talent to weave such a deep story with so many facets as “Into Bones Like Oil” have, and have done with in no less than 100 pages, that is truly remarkable! This is simply one well written novella, without a single word in excess!
The story starts innocently enough with the protagonist Dora arriving at the rooming house The Angelsea, trying to deal with her grief of the loss of her daughters, and it does not take long after she arrives The Angelsea for things to take a turn for the unsettling. With the other occupants in the house, all with their own reasons and regrets to stay at The Angelsea, all to sleep and forget the hardships of their lives, just like Dora. But they are all being used by The Angelsea’s unscrupulous owner, Roy, to talk to ghosts, mainly ghosts from a nearby shipwreck that is rumored to have a hidden treasure.
As the story progresses and Dora meets the other inhabitants of the rooming house, it all gets more and more unreal and unsettling, with the ghostly whispers of the dead, and with some of the living inhabitants’ true nature slowly being revealed.
The rooming house in itself feels like a character, the way it is built, its rooms, its location, its dead inhabitants, its nautical décor and finally its history, it all brings an immersive and unsettling layer to the story.
This is a story that grips and drags you in, and shows that grief is a hell of thing! Grief is something we all have to deal with at some points in our lives.
As I said before it is only 100 pages, but with its depth and layers it feels much longer, when I finished it, I felt like I had read a full-length novel. Kaaron Warren have written an fantastic novella, and I for one, will be reading more of her work in the future!
So, if you are on the lookout for a well written, unsettling and thought-provoking novella, then do yourself a favor and buy a copy of this book! You can pick it at these online stores and in any self-respecting bookshop!
BUY LINKS: IndieBound | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Goodreads
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Kaaron Warren has been publishing ground- breaking fiction for over twenty years. Her novels and short stories have won over 20 awards, from local literary to international genre. She writes horror steeped in awful reality, with ghosts, hauntings, guilt, loss, love, crime, punishment and a lack of hope.
This blog tour also has a giveaway: