Thursday, June 4, 2015

"Bones & All"

Camille DeAngelis is the author of the recently released Bones & All, Petty Magic: Being the Memoirs and Confessions of Miss Evelyn Harbinger, Temptress and Troublemaker, and Mary Modern, as well as a first-edition guidebook, Moon Ireland. She is a graduate of New York University (B.A. in Fine Arts, minor in Irish Studies, 2002) and the National University of Ireland, Galway (M.A. in Writing, 2005).

DeAngelis  applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Bones & All, and reported the following:
I laughed out loud when I turned to page 69, because for many readers this passage is one of the most horrifying in the whole novel. My boy- and babysitter-eating narrator, Maren, meets a sweet (and unsuspecting) old lady at the grocery store, and she brings Maren home and makes her breakfast. Later that day Maren meets an old man who also takes her under his wing, but in a very different way: Sully is the only person she's ever met who also does “the bad thing.” From the bottom of page 69:
The clock on the mantel chimed six as Sully brought his pack in from the sitting room, propped it against the refrigerator, and drew a long ropelike object out of the opening. At first I did think it was a rope, but then he pulled out the thick, silvery knot of Mrs. Harmon’s chignon and laid it out on the calico place mat with a sort of reverence, and I realized what the ropelike thing was made of. There were all sorts of hair woven into it, red and brown and black and silver, curly and kinky and slippery-straight. I never knew something could be so grotesque and so beautiful at the same time.
Sully's neverending rope of hair is part of why people say Bones & All reminds them of Stephen King, which of course I take as a huge compliment.
Visit Camille DeAngelis's website.

Writers Read: Camille DeAngelis.

--Marshal Zeringue