Into Bones like Oil

"A tale of creeping dread … Recommended." —Tade Thompson, author of Rosewater and The Murders of Molly Southbourne "Dark, disturbing, visceral" (5 stars) —NB Magazine 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.

Seb Doubinsky, award-winnning author of the City-States Cycle series

"‘Into Bones Like Oil’ is a horror novella that, in my eyes, embodies perfectly Kaaron Warren's universe. Starting as a classic situation - a woman seeks shelter in a strange house -, it very quickly becomes a gripping and idiosyncratic story of horror and redemption through the discovery of the pain of others. What I love about Kaaron Warren's writing, is that the uncanny is actually the normality, and what we call ‘normality’ is actually the real horror. Her characters are all wrecks, broken down in life and in the afterlife, and yet they shine with a dark and moving humanity that makes the reader reflect upon the given notions of ‘evil’, ‘friendship’, ‘support’, and many more. If I should ever teach a class on contemporary horror, ‘Into Bones Like Oil’ would definitely be on my list, to show the students how genre is made to be broken and re-invented. And Kaaron Warren is one of the best in her field when it comes to that."

she finds the fear she wants to explore, here taking a parent’s panic and extrapolating it. Warren is a mother who learnt to steal time standing at the stove cooking bolognaise sauce, stirring with one hand, writing with the other

"Protagonist Dora’s children are always at the back of her mind, at the fore. She has her eccentricities and multiplicities, and grave faults. As in all Kaaron Warren’s delightful but grim stories she borrows from something relatable. She reaches for the uncanny in the everyday, makes it stranger yet. Into Bones Like Oil is no deviant from this ingenious author’s modus operandi

but the Angelsea is anything but a peaceful respite. The ghosts of those drowned in a shipwreck visit each night to speak their last words through the mouths of the inn’s sleeping inhabitants. When the Angelsea’s owners pressure Dora to become a vessel for a ghost, she worries that she will encounter the spirits of her girls and that they will confirm her worst fears by blaming her for their deaths because she failed to protect them. No one in the small, eccentric cast of rooming house boarders is without their faults, and despite Dora’s flaws, readers will sympathize with her struggle to find forgiveness. This grim portrait of broken people in a broken setting reckoning with trauma, paranoia, and grief will especially appeal to horror readers who appreciate melancholic and atmospheric stories."

"A grieving mother is haunted by ghosts from her past in this dark, ethereal novella by Warren (The Gate Theory). Insomniac Dora, mourning the death of her two young daughters, comes to the Angelsea, a beachside rooming house, to escape her troubled life

Linda Hepworth, NB Magazine

“seeped into my bones like oil.” I feel in awe of Kaaron Warren’s ability to write a story which feels simultaneously other-worldly and yet entirely recognisable, as well as to create so many unforgettable characters in such a short novella. This is the first of her stories I’ve read, but I’m determined it won’t be the last."

Adam Weller, Fantasy Book Review

"A strange and compelling novella that plays with the reader's expectations, bending the narrative and its themes until its thought-provoking final page. Dora has lost everything a mother and wife could lose. She blames herself for these tragedies, and her low self-esteem and lack of confidence has turned her into a shell of a person. We meet Dora as she checks into the Angelsea, a rooming house in a nameless watefront town with almost no belongings, money, or purpose. The Angelsea is dilapidated, meager, cramped, and populated with the lost and forgotten people that society would rather sweep under the rug: ex-convicts, the mentally unstable, and a handful of other guests who silenty agree that one never talks about the past. The inn is also rumored to be a conduit for supernatural occurrences. Kaaron Warren is an accomplished, award-winning author with dozens of science fiction, fantasy, and horror short stories under her belt. Her talent for deftly weaving through these genres is on full display here. Although many of these characters are given little time in the spotlight, they are crafted with enough depth and dimension to bring about a understanding of their histories and motivations. The story culminates in a hazy, dreamlike catharsis that had me re-examine how I viewed the story from the beginning. Into Bones like Oil an unusually effective tale; hard to define, and harder to forget."

Signal Horizon

"Most Anticipated Upcoming Horror and Weird Fiction"

High Fever Books

"2019’s Most Anticipated Blood Curdlers"

Tade Thompson, author of Rosewater and The Murders of Molly Southbourne

"Warren delivers a tale of creeping dread. Dora is in a house that we all know and despise from travelling, but where the guests are used as conduits. For Dora the haunting by her past may be worse than anything supernatural and in Warren’s hands the horrific encroaches inexorably on the familiar. Recommended."

Tim Waggoner, author of The Forever House

"Beautifully written and profoundly disturbing, an evocative meditation on sorrow and loss, a ghost story in which the most terrifying specters come from within."

Colin Steele, The Canberra Times

"Into Bones Like Oil is an impressive, dark novella by one of Australia's most imaginative writers"

Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World

"Into Bones Like Oil is sinewy, disorientating, and devastating in the way all the best ghost stories are."

numerous, garrulous, plaintive, soaked in seawater and old sins

"Kaaron Warren’s ghosts

About the Author

Kaaron Warren's stories have appeared in Australia, the US, China, the UK, and elsewhere in Europe, and have been selected for both Ellen Datlow’s and Paula Guran’s Best of the Year Anthologies. Kaaron has lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Fiji. She has published five novels (Slights, Walking the Tree, Mistification, The Grief Hole and Tide of Stone) and seven short story collections, including the multi-award winning Through Splintered Walls. Her most recent short story collection is A Primer to Kaaron Warren from Dark Moon Books. Her novella “Sky” from that collection won the Shirley Jackson Award and was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. It went on to win all three of the Australian genre awards, while The Grief Hole did as well in 2017. In 2019, she has three Aurealis nominations: Tide of Stone, A Primer to Kaaron Warren, and Crisis Apparation, a novella. Kaaron was a Fellow at the Museum for Australian Democracy, where she researched prime ministers, artists and serial killers. In 2018 she was the Established Artist in Residence at Katharine Susannah Prichard House in Western Australia. She was Guest of Honour at World Fantasy Convention in 2018, New Zealand’s Geysercon in 2019, and Stokercon 2019.

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