Skein and Bone

by V.H. Leslie

*** Finalist for the World Fantasy Award ***
*** Finalist for the British Fantasy Award ***

The stunning debut collection of supernatural and ghost stories from V.H. Leslie. An assured and masterful collection of lush and evocative tales that will send frissons through you. "An absorbing and gorgeously unsettling collection." -- Alison Moore, Author of 'The Lighthouse,' (Short-Listed for the Man Booker Prize. V. H. Leslie's stories have appeared in a range of speculative publications, including Black Static, Interzone, Shadows & Tall Trees, Weird Fiction Review and Strange Tales IV and have been reprinted in a range of "Year's Best" anthologies.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories

228 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 17, 2015

About the author

I came to books early and enjoyed them so much that I’ve spent the best part of my life studying them. I taught English A Level for a number of years and I still write academic articles for a range of literary publications. Although I always knew that I wanted to write fiction, it was only recently that I began in earnest. I enjoy reading and writing fiction that focuses on psychological issues and perspectives, that blurs boundaries or takes place within liminal or marginal spaces. I like stories that are driven by setting and those that make connections to other texts, to mythology, folklore and art.

My short stories have appeared in a range of speculative publications, including Black Static, Interzone and Shadows and Tall Trees and have been reprinted in a range of “Year’s Best” anthologies. I’m a Hawthornden Fellow and was recently awarded a place at the Saari Institute in Finland, where I was researching Nordic myth and folklore. I won the Lightship First Chapter Prize in 2013 and was a finalist for the 2014 Shirley Jackson Award in the category of novelette. My debut short story collection Skein and Bone garnered comparisons to M.R. James and Shirley Jackson and was nominated for both the World Fantasy Award and the British Fantasy Award. My novel Bodies of Water, hailed a “feminist ghost story” was published by Salt Publishing and has just been translated into French. I’m currently studying for my PhD in English and Creative Writing at the University of Chichester.

Reviews

[Karl]

Table of Contents:

05 - "Namesake"
21 - "Skein and Bone"
51 - "Ghost"
61 - "Making Room"
65 - "Family Tree"
85 - "Time Keeping"
111 - "Bleak Midwinter"
117 - "The Blue Room"
135 - "Ulterior Design"
159 - "The Cloud Cartographer"
187 - "Preservation"
211 - "Wordsmith"
229 - "The Quiet Room"
263 - "Senbazuru"

[James Everington · Rating 5 out of 5]

VH Leslie's is a writer who I first became aware of via her work in Black Static and Shadows & Tall Trees, in which her stories were consistently among the best featured. So I've been looking forward to her debut collection for a long time, and by god Skein & Bone from Undertow Publications doesn't disappoint. In fact, it's one of the best collections of quiet, strange horror I've read for a long time.

Namesake, the opening story, perhaps sums up Leslie's approach: the story of a woman named Burden, trying to lose her unfortunate surname by finding a husband is intricately constructed from the outset, with every detail note perfect. When Burden meets Blithe, a man at a bar, the reader knows her anticipated happy ending isn't on the cards, but the actual ending is both chillingly ambiguous and clear like fine crystal. Namesake showcases Leslie's skill both at wordplay and literary allusion, neither of which detract from the horrific denouement.

There are almost too many highlights in this collection: the deeply unsettling haunting in The Quiet Room; the fantastic allegory of The Cloud Cartographer, the dark, dark comedy of Ghost and the hotel-based psychological horror in The Blue Room. There's plenty of uncanny things happening in these stories but what makes the unease really hit home is the emotional charge behind them all. Grief, loss and missed opportunities haunt Leslie's characters as much as the supernatural or ghostly.

Many of the stories use as a central metaphor something that is handmade, traditionally crafted: old dresses in Skein & Bone, the decoration of a new house in Ulterior Design (with yellow wallpaper, natch), the cooking of preserves in Preservation. There's a similar feel to the stories themselves: these are handcrafted, every allusion and metaphor woven together to make something unique. For this reason, Leslie excels at the endings of her stories: both the literal and the symbolic come together. Indeed, in the perfect last line of Preservation you know longer know or care which is which.

Absorbing, subtle, scary, exquisite - you really, really need to read Skein & Bone.

[Laura Mauro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having been a fan of V.H. Leslie's since reading 'Senbazuru' in Shadows And Tall Trees, I was very excited to pick this collection up. It's a truly beautiful volume, elegant as befitting the fluid, flowing prose Leslie writes. Thematically, it's quite wonderful - precious little gore and violence but an abundance of horrors all the same, from the indirect psychological warfare of Ulterior Design to the short, chilling and so very clever Bleak Midwinter. Namesake begins with intrigue and paranoia, slowly weaving towards a genuinely horrific denouement; The Cloud Cartographer is sprawling and breathlessly imaginative, while the melancholy of Wordsmith is interspersed with moments of pure sweetness. There isn't a dud story in the bunch, and Leslie's themes are beautifully subtle but powerful - showcasing the strength of her female characters without sacrificing personality, showing that vulnerability and agency are not mutually exclusive traits.

[Jose Cruz · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The past is never dead. It’s not even the past.”

Though he likely wasn’t aware of the fact, William Faulkner summarized a good majority of horror fiction with this eloquent little truth. The artifacts of the past constantly surround us. They are buried in the soil of our land, the stone of our homes, the flesh of our minds, stubbornly refusing to relinquish their hold on us, grafting themselves to us with strings of impenetrable scarlet thread.

A more recent narrative trope popularized by film is of the victim running away from the inescapable horror giving chase to them, the hulking hockey goalie and gigantic prehistoric reptile equally representing our timeless fears in spite of their diverse guises. These two themes form the emotional bedrock of V. H. Leslie’s Skein and Bone, a collection of stories greatly preoccupied with the notion of fleeing the darkness of the past in the hopes of reaching some golden tomorrow. The past in Leslie’s stories is something to be avoided, swept over, tucked away and forgotten. Her characters do not view their lives as obstacle-laden journeys from which they will grow and learn from but as the meandering, cancerous roots of a traumatic seed, roots that bind them to the ground and keep them from flying towards freedom like the copious birds that surface in almost every story, crushing wings and hopes without discretion.


These trauma-seeds come in multiple forms, from the seemingly mundane despair brought on by an unfavorable surname (“Namesake”) to the incomprehensible awkwardness of having to live with a feral parent (“Family Tree”). Trauma also occurs to characters attempting to maintain the rigid formality of their existences while having to contend with change, that most dastardly of encroaching terrors, as seen by the protagonists from “Time Keeping” and “Wordsmith”, meticulous gentlemen of varied disturbances who find their senses of self and satisfaction upended by the arrival of women into their lives.

Leslie’s prose and characterizations are always on point, reveling in subtle and overt forms of wordplay that reveal the author’s love of the language and the intricacies of her characters in equal measure. In some stories the words mean everything, full of portent and wisdom and even sentience at times, with characters obsessing over all their double meanings and limitless interpretations. In addition to the burdened heroine of “Namesake”, there is the possibly-immortal Vernon from “Wordsmith”, a man whose facility for the language and gift for literally bringing words to life is limited to writing single phrases on slips of paper and planting them in the ground in the hopes that they will take root. The diplomat’s wife from “Senbazuru” faces a similar inability, her go-to move of choosing “paper” in the life-deciding games of “Rock, Paper, Scissors” she plays with her husband made ironic by the fact that she can’t actually commit any meaningful words to paper when composing. The author shows us how our words hinder us as much as they help us, and how they almost always haunt us.

If the stories could be said to suffer from any one weakness it would have to be with regards to the endings. Many of the early entries in the collection start off full steam-ahead, as assured and graceful as anything else, but they tend to break down in little ways as they reach their climaxes. Some endings don’t feel entirely deserved, or deliver last-minute twists that compromise believability and investment in the characters’ plights. (The final section of “Family Tree”, for instance, asks us to accept a sudden, dramatic shift in a character’s mental makeup as a defined facet of their inner nature that had simply been dormant up until that very point.)

But even if a few selections seem to unspool at their conclusions, Leslie makes her natural gifts more than apparent in every story, ensuring that the reading of each is never without its valuable takeaways. Skein and Bone only seems to get better the further the reader advances in the collection, with the best of the bunch occurring right after the halfway point. (This halfway point seems to be yet another clever pun, as the seventh of the fourteen stories is a chilly anecdote of sinister snowpeople called “Bleak Midwinter.”)

Leslie delivers a great one-two punch with “The Blue Room” and “Ulterior Design.” Both draw from the long tradition of the ghost story in their own ways, the latter a direct recasting of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic study of deterioration, “The Yellow Wallpaper”. The former is noteworthy for the intense patina of colors that Leslie uses to sublime effect, infusing her eloquently-described passages with psychological resonance as a suffering wife attempts to recuperate in the shelter of the Hyde Hotel’s most sumptuous room and is haunted by both the shadow of all her failures and the crow-carrying spirit of a Picasso painting come to life. It all ends on a graceful note of hope perfectly delivered.

But Gwen could see her. She could see the way her shoulders hunched, the way she sat crumbled into the bench, a sense of sadness in her anonymity. How many invisible women were there in the world, sitting on park benches just like this one, their colour drained out of them by others, siphoned off so that they had none left for themselves? Slowly disappearing into a world that was too bright for them.

“Ulterior Design” is great for similar reasons, though its vision of triumph is decidedly bleaker than “The Blue Room”, detailing as it does the course of ever-deepening madness followed by a soon-to-be father as he becomes convinced that his wife is conspiring with the hummingbird-spangled wallpaper of the nursery room to knock him off his pedestal as family provider. Daniel, our beleaguered protagonist, has his insecurities literalized through dreams and visions that would leave Freud panting: cracked windows; cages fashioned from umbilical cords; chick-filled nests knocked down from branches “Rockabye Baby”-style.

The title story, “Skein and Bone”, pays homage to this spectral institution as well, kicking off with the tried and true setup of travelers in a foreign land–a pair of sisters here–getting lost and seeking shelter in an imposingly beautifully manse, here a French chateau from the Renaissance. (There’s even a callback at the climax that ghost story aficionados will recognize from “The Adventure of the German Student”, among others.) Leslie keeps the foreboding mood gently simmering for the early duration of the tale, raising the temperature with a patient hand as the light strangeness of the severe maid attending to the sisters’ needs and the room of mannequins dressed in incredibly preserved garments gradually increase until the horror becomes too heavy for the women to withstand, another pair of birds crushed under the weight of their dreams.

Moving on from the high of “The Blue Room” and “Ulterior Design”, Leslie shows she’s just as capable as navigating new and adventurous terrain as she is treading familiar territory. In addition to the aforementioned “Wordsmith”, the latter part of the collection gives us such poetic and surreal tales as “The Cloud Cartographer”, a story more in line with fantasy than horror but no less enthralling for its depiction of a navigator mapping out a New World in the sky while grappling with memories of his lost sister; “Preservation”, a poignant and marvelously strange account of a post-WWII happy-homemaker housewife literally bottling up her sadness and feeding her mentally- and physically-scarred veteran husband her evaporated tears when she suspects him of some kind of infidelity and he of her autonomic bid to displace him as man of the house (No doubt he’d see it as further testament to her not knowing her place, his semi-naked wife dancing around her cauldron.), even though the only thing they’re really suffering from is the quiet horror of emotional withdrawal; and the final selection, “Senbazuru”, another story of husbands and wives in the midst of the War, here delivered in a more oblique and refined fashion by Leslie, resulting in a piece of truly Weird Fiction that defies any other classification, a tale about sacrifice and cultural dissonance and the beauty of words, uniting Leslie’s fascinations for birds and the spark of hope that touches her best work to create a most satisfying end to her premier collection.

It can’t be denied that Skein and Bone represents a gathering of stories that are inextricably bound to their author, each fascination and passion of Leslie’s reprised time and again throughout the text, echoes resonating from the chambers of her mind. It’s said that as a writer one should know what their obsessions are, and Leslie is surely aware of hers. It’s a testament to her talents that she is able to use these themes and constantly reinvent and reinvigorate them in each story. They are stories that come straight from her heart, stories cut right from the bone.

[lady h · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't like a single story in this collection.

Perhaps it was my mistake going in, thinking I was picking up a horror book, when instead I was actually reading weird fiction. There are few things in the world I hate more than weird fiction. And the stories in this collection were certainly weird.

Many of them feature flat characters who become completely obsessed with bizarre phenomenon or who are approaching the edges of madness in some way. The utter flatness of the characters would have been passable had the plots been intriguing, but most of the stories just seemed to meander from scene to scene, with little to connect them all together. Also, most of the male characters were completely detestable - I understand that this served to establish realism, but it also got quite tiring being in these characters' heads.

Some stories seemed to have potential, appearing to build up to a satisfying conclusion, but instead culminate in frustrating ambiguity. I kept searching for some kind of conclusive answer but found nothing. This works sometimes, if the perhaps features compelling characters, but given that the characters here almost seemed to be stand-ins, it only served to further detract from the overall narrative. In the end, most of the stories felt choppy, uneven, and incomplete.

The only reason I didn't give this one star is because the writing is decent, and I actually managed to get through the entire thing, even though it took me over a month. But again, maybe if weird fiction is your thing, you'll like this collection. I understand the author is pretty prolific and this has been a generally well-received book, so it's probably not objectively bad or anything, just really, really not my thing.

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

These stories remind me a lot of the work of Kelly Link or Elizabeth Hand, perhaps a bit of Helen Marshall in there too. They tend to be milder weird fiction of a more emotional bent, tinged with melancholy and often with a magical, other-worldly feel to them. Leslie can generate a good scare when she chooses (see "The Blue Room" and especially "Skein and Bone.")

Unfortunately those scares are few and far between. There's some good stories here, but the only ones I really _loved_ were "Skein and Bone" and "The Blue Room." "Ulterior Design," "Time Keeping" and "The Quiet Room" are all worthwhile reads. The rest just didn't do much for me. Too mild for my taste. I'm more of a Thomas Ligotti, Livia Llewellyn, Simon Strantzas kinda guy.

There's a feminist undertone to many of these tales, we see it running through the weird opener, "Nakesake" to the masterful "Skein and Bone," but it comes out most effectively in the chilly "The Blue Room."

Namesake - A strange little tale, it starts out rather dour, but ends upbeat, in it's weird way. It has some pretty creepy moments too. A woman wants to get rid of her surname "Burden," but she soon starts suspecting her fiancé is hiding something.

Skein and Bone - Wow, this is an excellent story, certainly one of the best in the book. It has it all; great atmosphere, deeper meaning, and yes, it's actually quite scary too. It has a somewhat standard beginning; protagonists getting stranded in a storm and seeking refuge in an old house, but it's hardly average fare. It reminded me a bit of Angela Carter's masterful story "The Snow Pavilion." Two sisters depart Paris and when they become stranded in a storm they seek refuge in an old mansion, with a very curious housekeeper.

Ghost - A sad little story, about letting go, and the messy nature of death, and life too I suppose. After a woman's husband dies a long, drawn-out and painful death his widow contends with his messy pond and a strange survivor that still lives there.

Making Room - Minimalist weird fiction -- or de-cluttering weird fiction at least. It's a very short story, but is still effective on the subject of our baggage/past haunting our life. A young woman's new boyfriend convinces her that the childish fear of a monster under the bed is actually related to all the baggage from her past she is holding onto.

Family Tree - A strange little story, not among my favorites. The ending brings a bit of a shock which the story needed, but it just didn't do a lot for me. A boy deals with a hippie mother and a father who is returning to nature.

Time Keeping - This story took me a little time to warm up to, but it becomes increasingly interesting. I more or less saw the end coming, but it was still horrific and effective. A watchmaker obsessed with time starts an affair with the niece of his parts supplier, with shocking results.

Bleak Midwinter - The shortest story in the book, effective for what it is. A mother takes care of her daughter on a cold winter day, who is too innocent to know the danger they are in.

The Blue Room - This was another great one, perfect pacing and execution. The inexplicable events combined with a protagonist feeling isolated and frightened in a foreign land reminded me a bit of Aickman's work. One of the best in the book, with more than a couple chilling moments. A woman separates from her husband and takes a trip, staying in a blue room in a hotel that forces her to confront her own painful memories.

Ulterior Design - Oh no, wow...whatta horror story. The influence of Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" is felt heavily here, maybe a bit of "The Shining" as well. This is great with it's increasing suspense and paranoia, it starts out fairly mild and I felt I knew where it was headed, but I had no idea... A new father-to-be is increasingly obsessed and frightened by the strange nature-scene wallpaper his wife has put in their bedroom.

The Cloud Cartographer - A creative, melancholy tale with some touches of eeriness here and there, and one particularly grim moment if you connect the dots. There's a deep sense of being haunted by loss, and that loss shaping one's life and desires, almost unknowingly. A man is tasked with exploring, charting, and actually walking on the clouds for development. He starts to suspect he isn't alone.

Preservation - This story has a really clever idea; it's a muted, sad story, with the weird/supernatural elements mostly kept at the edges. A lonely housewife and expert cook starts preserving her painful emotions in jars when she feels rejected by her war-scarred husband.

Wordsmith - This is a touching story, certainly strange, but another mild entry. A man who creates words contends with his own loss of inspiration, and outliving everyone he loves.

The Quiet Room - This is a sad ghost tale, quite well-done I thought. It has some creative spins on an old idea and a generous share of eerie moments. After a man and his daughter move into an old house he begins to feel the presence of his recently deceased, estranged wife.

Senbazuru - Ok little tale to wrap up the collection, it generates a strange, fairy tale mood but is among my least favorites. A British woman, the wife of a diplomat lives in Nagasaki in the anxious, but often lazy days preceding the bombing.

[Sophie · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are some interesting ideas here... badly executed. It feels like everything exists purely for the denouement, which is where the idea is laid out. Never fully explored.

The writing doesn't excite, it isn't poetic, it simply is. I think these stories would have benefitted from the editorial process.

[Regina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some truly, wonderfully twisted and creepy tales in this collection of shorts. Standouts for me being:
Namesake
Skein and Bone
Preservation
Wordsmith
Senbazuru

V.H. Leslie's short tales are definitely a recommended read.

[Tomasz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Underwhelming. Poorly edited (spelling errors ahoy), sometimes not straying beyond poorly masked triviality. Probably the best - but still not mind-blowing - was the tale that gave the title to the entire collection, a neat update on an old-school formula.

[Des Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

SENBAZURU

“The Lady of Shalott at least had her tapestry to keep her busy.”

This is an exquisite coda to the book’s stories as a gestalt that I have read over the last few days, and to its stories that I once read a year or so ago that still reside in my mind if in a less defined form, with such elements of misty memory and focused immediacy creating, I claim, a theme-and-variations on time keeping and time losing.
A blend of the senility into which I must enter if the body doesn’t get me first, like the lovely time-keeping British lady in this last story, one with a beautiful Japanese ambiance and tone, that passiveness I spoke about above, in her Japanese tower able to view all points of the compass, and with a memory of her time-losing mother in Britain in a similar tower, then the war that affected expatriates in Japan, the outcomes of her marriage, a marriage ever celebrating its Paper anniversary, a husband with whom she made decisions by the game of paper-scissors-rock, as this whole story celebrates paper, the lady’s accreted collection of 1000 origami paper cranes not necessarily the lifting sort but the feathered sort (or perhaps both?), paper’s messages and paper’s cuts and snow creating a window’s blankness and perhaps, I imagine, a silent snowman, too… And a different purity as this lady’s ultimate Proustian self?
This highly satisfying book is its own complement. A game of skein or bone.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.

[Ian Casey · Rating 3 out of 5]

A promising and thoroughly British debut collection from V. H. Leslie, Skein and Bone already demonstrates her own voice within the nebulous area of strange tales and quiet horror, notwithstanding shades of Aickman and - pleasantly surprisingly - Dunsany.

There is the occasional monster to be found, but for the most part these are intimate tales of human relationships and the pain of loss, with relative subtlety in their supernatural twists. Many also feature a layer of abstraction, or rather of tangible manifestations of abstract concepts such as time, sound, emotion, and language. In that respect one can see at least a resonance with Dunsany, if not influence per se.

Many writers have their recurring motifs, and for Leslie it is birds. They appear frequently in these stories in varied forms, often to emphasise themes of entrapment and escape.

In a tough field, this didn't set my world on fire but did enough to pique my interest for her future writings.

[Chris Riley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sadly, the praise within this book doesn't do it justice. This was by far one of the best short story collections I've ever read--and I've read a lot. V.H. Leslie is a fantastic author, in more ways than one. Every story was unique, and creative. Every ending was a nail in the coffin. Her writing style is both haunting and humorous. This author has a masterful, lyrical way with stringing words and paragraphs together, which very few writers ever obtain. Also, in this collection are exquisite examples of vivid imagery, and "showing" versus "telling". And all of this says nothing about the beautiful artwork and fine editing. If you like dark fiction, and you like reading great stories, don't hesitate. Get this book.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was recommended to me by the Amazon email bots a couple weeks back, and I was in a "why not?" kind of mood at the time, so I picked it up. Kudos to the targeted marketing programmers, because this book delivered in every possible way. What an incredible and accomplished collection of thoughtful, sinister, mournful, and very smart tales. Gorgeous, ornate writing without a whiff of pretension. Characters who immediately feel genuine and believable. Stories that stay exactly as long as needed. A delight.

[Gareth · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Great First Collection

As a route to this wonderful collection I should thank Priya Sharma's fiction blog, and James Everington's The Hyde Hotel.
There tales are of suspense wrapped in emotion, an exploration of trapped human spirit.

[Sofie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing collection of fiction, not one clunker in the bunch. Every single story will unnerve the reader in one way or another.

[Arthur Avalos · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some of the stories were ok, others just didn’t make sense. Overall I got through half of the book. Not a book of short stories I would recommend.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why Did I buy the book? - I respect the publisher
I had never heard of this author before.

I am reviewing the stories in order from my least favourite
to favourite.

Making Room
A young relationship can be destroyed by the past
under the bed. Sometimes quite literally!

This one has a clever idea at the centre and the
prose is very nice as it is across the collection
but I do think it is the weakest story.

Wordsmith
Vernon is a Wordsmith who understands the
power of words more than most.

Filled with allusions to Poe. I've got to admit I
didn't really get this one. I do enjoy the prose though
and some of the themes on the nature of words
are interesting.

Ghost
Annette's husband Fergus recently died. She notices the old fish ghost
is still alive in the water. As her children ask her to get rid
of the pond the fish begins to haunt her life and dreams.

Funny and poignant in all the right places. This story
mixes the very relatable situation of being left alone
after a spouse dies and a gripping ghost story.

Bleak Midwinter
Christina and her mother are sheltering in the middle of a Snowstorm.
Unfortunately this world is haunted by the Snowmen waiting to prey on
Anyone who comes out onto the snow.

Turns the Snowmen of childhood into horrific spectral figures. And
beneath all this the story explores mother/daughter relationships.
Plus I love winter, it's my favourite season. It could have been longer
though it was a bit slight.

Namesake
A woman named Burden, desperate to be rid of her surname
soon discovers that her new partner might have one or two secrets.

Opens the collection with a bang. I really liked the premise. Reminded
me a bit of Jane Eyre.

Senbazaru
A British expat in Japan in WWII dreams of paper birds.

I liked the historical setting and the exploration of Japanese
culture.

Family Tree
A Young Boy living with his mother has to
deal with the fact that his father has gone
feral and lives in the garden.

This one has a really bizarre concept and its
well executed. But it just didn't connect with me
as much as some of the other stories.

Preservation
Dulcie and Niles don't have the perfect
marriage they pretend they do. But soon they
will have to face up to this.

I don't think it's outright stated but this
seems to be set just after the war. A very
effective exploration of the domestic setup and
relationships.

Skein and Bone
Twins exploring a seemingly
deserted French mansion and discover mannequin
dresses creepy spectral housekeepers and libraries.

Loads of really effective imagery and ideas here which makes
this story the easiest to conjure up in my head. Can be enjoyed on many
levels, as a simple ghost story or a rich layered piece with ideas about
oppression of women and original sin.

Ulterior Design
Daniel is convinced his family and the new wallpaper are conspiring against him.
Is he just going mad or could he be onto something.

Really good central idea with a creepy atmosphere and some
beautiful prose make this one of my favourites.

Time Keeping
Howard maintains Time very rigidly and had to keep to his
routines, but can his new lady friend Helen be trusted to keep time
as well as him.

Really good ideas and just the right length. The protagonist
is very likeable which isn't common in these types of story and
it ended well wick is often tricky. Reminded me a bit of a
kids show I watched as a child called mopatops shop, don't ask why.

The Blue Room
Bella has checked into the Blue Room where
a painting begins to unnerve her. The colour Blue
Slowly begins to overtake her life inside and outside the hotel.

This is one is very effective and has similarities with Ulterior Design
but this one comments on how depression can colour your life.

The Cloud Cartographer
Follows a man who is mapping the clouds which
are constantly changing. And is his mind playing tricks on him?

The Setting and concept are really entertaining. Lots of good visuals
and imagery. This is probably no better or worse than a few of the stories
further down the list but subjectively I love this sort of thing

The Quiet Room
Ava's mother is dead and she is adjusting to living with her Dad Terry.
Her mum's ashes remain in the house though and Terry is
about to face the spectre of his estranged wife.

My favourite story in the collection. Real people with real life issues
and relationships that make them relatable. Couple this with a truly
disturbing horror aspect and everything just clicks.

Summary: Congratulations V.H. Leslie and me for discovering a new author.
I have her novella Bodies of Water lined up to read and I'm looking forewarned to
It. A real up and coming British talent.

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Before you read this book : Prepare for the Crazy



The writing is great, it's hard not to be a fan of the style, it's all very descriptive but I must admit the first few stories (the first 5 - yikes!) didn't immediately grab my attention or give me want/will to brag about my time spent reading them (and who doesn't love that? ) They start off a bit YA for my taste, a little bit John Green (if y'know what I mean) dare I say a bit Stephen King in one of his recently published flops Bazaar of Bad Dreams - did anyone actually take the time to read that entire hefty piece of...? I pity you - anyway, I don't despise all YA but when it comes to the the YA/horror genre it tends to cause some cringing on my end. Story No. 6 Bleak Midwinter was when I got turned on my head by this author, The Blue Room, Ulterior Design, Preservation, etc. continued with the flow of crazy brilliance. The YA feel evaporates bringing to light the subtly of the last half of this book which is precisely a perfect mix of horror/strange/wacky - directly up my ally of bliss - and therefore this novel is a toughy to rate !

Rating : 1st Half : 2 stars
2nd Half : 4 stars

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of 14 short stories of traditional quiet horror, several of which I previously read in Black Static magazine. V.H.Leslie can craft a good story, but like in most collections some of these worked for me and some of them didn't. She is particularly effective at setting a scene, but I did find some of the denouements (such as in the title story, "Skein and Bone", and also "Family Tree") to be a little obvious (tied to the genre for which they are written) for my tastes. This - of course - amounts to personal preference, and other readers might feel differently. Generally the prose is quite straightforward, occasionally repetitious. However, for a first collection this book certainly illuminates future potential and I would definitely seek out more of her work.

My favourite was "Ghost" - a weird story about a koi carp - which contained some surprisingly chilly moments and not as silly as my description makes it sound; "Time Keeping" - which had a great premise as to one man's obsessions; the SF story "The Cloud Cartographer" with an interesting central conceit; and "Senbazuru", a story set in Japan which nicely balanced the mundane with the foreign.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this short story collection.

More supernatural than horror.

My interpretation of a fair few of the stories is that the supernatural is merely an interesting catalyst for character development. In many you could say that the supernatural is just an outward reflection of the protagonist's (or antogonsist's) psyche.

Funnily enough Skein and Bone (the titular story) fits the theme the least, but it's still a good story.

My personal favourite was Preservation followed very closely by The Blue Room. The only story I didn't particularly like was Wordsmith, I just didn't get it (too hard work).

You can find a freebie example of one of the shorter stories in the collection at http://www.thisishorror.co.uk/making-....

The only thing that let some of the stories down (ever so slightly) was that they lacked explanation. I would have liked a little bit more explaining in stories such as Namesake and Ulterior Design.

[Ryan Pidhayny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Skein and Bone is a collection of weird stories with a strong undercurrent of horror flowing through many of them. The subtle, eerie horror found in "Ghost", "The Quiet Room", and "Skein and Bone" worked very well and I enjoyed the smart wordplay of "Namesake" and "Wordsmith". Overall it is a good read for fans of weird and horror fiction alike, though the latter should be forewarned that not all the stories within are horror.

[Kain · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great short story collection. I think these stories compared to the usual horror short's that I read were nicely spread out and come to a nice conclusion. Sometimes a heart wrenching one compared with the usual shock and gore, they made me think alot more and sympathise.

[Ivy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel a few stories could have been a bit longer with a slower build up. Otherwise amazing.