Bone White

This book confounded me. I wanted so much to like it…Malfi is a good writer, the setup was well crafted, Dread’s Hand was a great location, its backstory was intriguing and made you want to find out what’s going on there. BUT… The book is not greater than the sum of its parts, and never comes together to form a satisfying whole. There are several reasons – the characters are not particularly interesting and very few of them even figure into the main storyline; there are a number of plot threads and side jaunts that don’t pay off or go anywhere; and the “villain” for want of a better word has no character at all, which leaves the story without a satisfactory resolution. So no, I can’t recommend this particular title. Which is a shame.Now, given the number of five stars reviews this book has received, I’m sure there will be some reading this who’ll bristle and say “Hey! You don’t know what you’re talking about!” Which could be true. For those who are interested I’ll explain in more detail and you can draw your own conclusions. But there will be SPOILERS involved, so for those not wanting anything given away, just tally my downvote and move along. Hurry, you fool!Spoilers in 5...4…3…2...1…Okay, now that that’s over…let me say this up front: This is NOT a wendigo story. You might think so from the setting, and the build-up, and there are a couple of Dread’s Hand backstories that suggest it (Paul even mentions the legend) but none of that actually pans out. So if that’s what you’re after with this book, you’d best look elsewhere.Okay, let’s dig a little deeper. One of the major problems, right from the get-go, are the characters. There aren’t many – we mainly follow Paul Gallo, who’s looking for his missing twin brother Danny, who we see in a few flashbacks. Other characters include Detective Ryerson, who’s working the case of the murders in Dread’s Hand; a few other incidental cops who barely figure into the story; Val Drammel, the safety officer in Dread’s Hand; a few other townfolk who also barely figure into the story; and Joe Mallory, the serial killer we meet right in the first chapter. You’d think Joe would be the most colorful, since serial killers are usually pretty reliable for that sorta thing. But there’s nothing creepy or unsettling about ol’ Joe – he’s just there to kick-start the story and set it in motion, and after just a few chapters he exits, choking all the way, stage right. We never find out why he bothered to confess his crimes, or why he committed them in the first place really, or why he kills himself (IF he kills himself…we never really find out any more about that, either…)Most of the other characters are used chiefly for exposition, like Detective Ryerson who digs up some backstory on the area and the killings but doesn’t really participate in the main storyline, or Val Drammel, who begrudgingly shows Paul around the town but doesn’t actually do much beyond that. The townspeople are just there to give Paul the cold shoulder for whatever reason, their behavior is never really explained. That leaves Paul Gallo himself as the focus of the story; unfortunately he’s not particularly deep. He’s a professor (we know this because one flashback takes place in his lecture hall) and he feels guilty because his ne’er-do-well twin went missing a year ago and Paul was always responsible for him. And that’s about it. And not a character endowed with an overabundance of common sense either. A few examples...- After going to Alaska to talk to the cops about the murders in Dread’s Hand (a town surrounded by a cordon of crosses, no less!), he decides to actually go to this cursed town and never once gives a thought to arming himself. Has this guy never seen a horror movie EVER?!? After all, it’s just a serial killer town with devils walking around in the woods, why would you need to protect yourself! If it were me, I would’ve tried to buy a shotgun and if I couldn’t, settled on a good stout axe. And the presence of all those crosses surrounding Dread’s Hand would’ve sent me to the nearest church to have it blessed. (Which would’ve paid off nicely in the climax, but more on that later…)- Paul drives to Dread’s Hand with a snow storm on his heels and checks into the local hotel just in time. When he wakes up in the middle of the night and sees someone looking in his window, he immediately runs out into this utterly unfamiliar town surrounded by wilderness, in a snowstorm no less, without a weapon or a map or presumably even his coat and boots, unless he was wearing them in bed.- Paul asks around about his brother but gets no help, so he decides to go up into the hill country, where they’re even MORE unfriendly, to see the serial killer’s cabin. Alone, of course, and again, no weapon, not even a flashlight. But at least he’d downloaded the flashlight app on his phone, so he’s not a complete boob.- After seeing lots and lots of crosses and weird symbols on Joe Mallory’s cellar wall, he immediately intuits that it’s a map (!) though to what I’m not sure. Right after that he’s told to leave town, so he sets his plan in motion – he drives out of town, has a nice detailed breakfast along the highway, then goes back and parks his SUV on the outskirts of town and hikes into the wilderness on his own. I'm not sure what he thinks he'll find but he evidently figures it won't take long ‘cause he doesn’t bother to buy a backpack or sleeping bag or even snow boots for that matter.I could go on, but you get the picture. He’s not a guy to have much faith in, or empathy for, and his exploits in the finale certainly don’t help things. But we’ll get to that.There are plenty of intriguing plot points and threads that go nowhere. That cordon of crosses around the town…who put them up? (We never find out.) Are they meant to keep things out or keep them in? (We don’t really find that out either.) Dread’s Hand started out as a mining town, but one day all of its people just disappeared. Do we find out why? Or why ANYONE would move back there and start the town up again? (No and no.) A reporter tells Paul various stories from the town’s past, some hinting at cannibalism, one about a skeletal guy who materialized hundreds of miles away in the snow with no shoes on…but that’s the last we hear about it. Just an interesting aside that’s never pursued. At one point Drammel takes Paul up into the hills to see the old mine, which caved in sometime back and now looks like a giant mouth swallowing all the cabins around it, and you think oh good, now we’re getting somewhere…only we’re not because the mine never comes up again. There’s also a lot of flu going around – Detective Ryerson gets sidelined with it after visiting Dread’s Hand at the first, and later Paul is struck down with fever while traipsing around in the foothills – and it starts to seem like a lot of foreshadowing, like this illness is somehow tied to the town, and to the evil up in those hills…but no, it’s just the flu, or hypothermia, or whatever. False alarm. Every time you get a tooth into a promising bit of plot, it just peters out.Let’s move on to the climax, and the characterization of the “villain”. In short, there is no characterization of the villain. We’re told at one point that in these woods the Devil will approach you as a doppelganger of yourself, and I thought that was a perfect opportunity for Paul to think he’s found his brother only to realize he’s faced with his own evil twin. Would’ve also made for a great dialogue scene where the villain gets to explain its own backstory and mythology and perhaps inadvertently give Paul a clue as to how to defeat or outwit it. But we don’t get anything like that. We get Paul refusing to accept everything that’s gone before, doing something remarkably stupid and in the process getting another character killed and himself almost disemboweled. Way to go Paul. There is no dramatic clash of Good vs Evil, just a tussle in the snow and it’s over. And in the end the Devil turns out to be a 100 year old wolf (!) that’s killed by a Buck knife. And not even one that’s been blessed – I could’ve bought into that. Just a regular ol’ knife.Afterward Paul tells the detective that he “doesn’t think there’ll be any more horror stories about Dread’s Hand”. So there you go, a hundred plus years of tainted land and smoldering evil, tied up with a pretty bow courtesy of the Buck Knife company. I hope they at least get a good advertising campaign out of this.

BONE WHITE, by Ronald Malfi is a book that I'm already certain will make it into my "top reads of the year" list. There isn't much "NOT" to praise about this novel!Malfi begins with a chilling--both figuratively and literally--scene in the tiny, remote town of Dread's Hand, Alaska. A man suffering from severe frostbite and dehydration wanders into the only eating establishment, announcing that someone should call the safety officer, Val Drammell, so that he can show him the location of eight bodies he buried in the woods.". . . patches of his clothes had grafted to open sores along his torso and thighs."The scene then shifts to Paul Gallo, an unmarried school teacher who's twin brother, Danny, disappeared a year ago. His last known location--Dread's Hand.After this set up, Malfi really nails the characterization of all of his main cast through various means. We have flashbacks of Paul and Danny's childhood, and the different directions each one took into adulthood. He gives us some insight into the alleged murderer, Joseph Mallory, along with the lives and superstitions of the few people who call "The Hand" their year round home. We learn about Val Drummel, and his role in the isolated, mostly wooded area."No locals would come out here . . . "Paul's next step is to see the Detective of Major Crimes, Jill Ryerson, who was responsible for initiating the search for Danny a year ago--a search that ended with his abandoned rental car on the only road into Dread's Hand.". . . Time . . . acts funny out here."With that, Paul sets out to Dread's Hand, himself--at this point, I couldn't have put down the story if I tried.To say that this novel was seeped in the icy, isolated atmosphere of an extremely remote and mostly shunned town, would be the understatement of the year.". . . You look into that woods and something looks back at you. . . "Through Malfi's writing, the reader actually walks that frigid land with the characters, hears the first-hand accounts of residents, the century-old superstitions that they believe as indisputable truths, and can practically feel the open hostility and distrust of any outsiders.". . . she said there were bad places on earth--dark spots, like bruises--and that Dread's Hand was one of them . . . there were devils up there . . . "BONE WHITE is the kind of book that has the power to mentally take you out of your comfort zone, and transport you into its action. No matter what you read, in the context of this story it will seem believable. This is the tale that nightmares are made of, that make you believe in demons and monsters of all kinds.". . . A man walks in there, he stand a chance of being touched by the devil. And that man, he goes sour . . . "I've found that with most stories, I can easily walk right back into my everyday life after reading them. After all: ". . . anyone can take one story and rationalize it until it fits with their perception of the world . . . "This is that rare exception that permeates your mind, and refuses to leave, forcing you to keep thinking over the events you've just read, and formulating connections that you may not have consciously noted before. There are many pieces to this puzzle--some obvious, and some much more subtle--but they will all be with you in the end. A fantastic novel with the power to haunt you for a long time to come--what will you choose to believe?". . . 'We have seen the devil and he is us!'"Highest recommendation!

Just so you know a three star novel for me is a novel that held my interest, I finished, but had parts that I wasn’t a fan of. Afour star novel for me is one I couldn’t put down and was riveted.My Thoughts:Every character in this novel was more interesting than me than the main character. I understand at the end why the author deliberately crafted him as a stubborn paternalistic rational to the bones guy. Know this: Paul is on a mission to find his brother Danny and he won’t stop until he succeeds. Because hey it’s his life mission. He owes his dad. And boy is he like his dad.Incidentally it is BECAUSE of his obsessive mission (I define it as obsession when you endanger yourself and others) that we learn more about the lore behind the town because of his skepticism (in my opinion he is downright obnoxious). It is the lore that kept me going. The odd close lipped towns people of Dead Hand and the detective work of the officers seeking to find their answers.What is going on? That is why I kept reading. I wanted to know and unfortunately I did it through the main character. But to be fair I would take a skeptic even an obnoxious one over a character who is a mystic know all unphased by the dark things happening.Author does a good job of keeping the answers hidden until the end and in a cohesive way. Give it a try if you like. It’s just towards the end I skipped through a bit because I had lost all patience for the main character. Too paternalistic for my patience but of course there is a reason for it yet it does not make him sympathetic or more tolerable.It wasn’t his logic that was so unreasonable because he is a skeptic it was his delivery. Or his observations. Sometimes it’s not what you say but how you say it. I’m sure the author intended this.

I loved the idea of this book, and i enjoyed a lot of it, but for me it didn't quite fulfil its potential and an ending that sort of fizzled out.

My first Ronald Malfi book and have now bought three more, really well-paced, atmospheric story.

Absolutely brilliant. Highly recommended read!

What a terrifyingly fantastic novel. I loved every aspect of it. Mr. Malfi is a masterful storyteller. The book hooked me from the start: in a small Alaskan town diner, a old disheveled codger walks in and calmly informs the regulars that "They’re all dead, and I killed ‘em. But I’m done now and that’s that.” After this opening, we are pulled into the world of Paul Gallo. An English professor from the east coast, who heads to Alaska in search of his twin brother, who has been missing for over a year. Paul fears that he was killed by the old man who recently confessed to murdering eight people. Will he find what he is looking for?The setting of an isolated, small community in the backwoods of Alaska, would instill terror in most people. Although many of us will say we love the mountains, and the peace and quiet that comes with it, we would still fear being lost in the woods, or running into issues in the wilderness with no help or no communication to the outside world. I appreciated the characters Mr. Malfi developed and although we sympathized with Paul, we kept wanting him to tuck his tail between his legs and get the hell out of Dread's Hand. Unfortunately, that is not who Paul was and he refused to leave without finding out what happened to his brother.This is the second novel I read from Mr. Malfi. I started with his recent "Come With Me" and knew I had to discover more. I picked up "Bone White" and "Floating Staircase" within the last few weeks and chose this one first. I have become a true Ronald Malfi fan. Five 'devilish' Stars.

I have read Bone White right after discovering Ronald Malfi with Come With Me as I was so impressed with his writing. It was a very good decision, as Mr. Malfi's writing style is no one-book-wonder but a very beautiful and artful craft.If I want to be completely honest, I think that "Come with Me" was just a little bit better, and I felt like this was a excellent exercise to get to the masterpiece that the latter truly is. The framework is the same (man searches for lost brother vs man searches for a unknown part of his departed wife) and both have the same structure and feel. And "Come with Me" became a perfect book because of this I believe.Comparing the two, I would have given Bone White 4.5 stars. But if I would have read it first I would have had no hesitation giving it 5. That is why I still gave it the 5 it really deserves. I'm off to some other author now, but the rest of his books are most certainly on my list ! What a great author.