Holy Bones

by Isa Arsén

This is a tall pour of fabulism from the American South, served neat and garnished with a gunshot in the middle of the Georgia backwoods. Janus Ward is a lonely man with a list of secrets so long he can hardly roll them all up into his back pocket anymore, chief among them the fact he can see the souls of everyone going through life around him. Blue, green, purple, yellow, the occasional and disastrous green, everyone has an aura—except for Janus’ own reflection, but there’s too much going wrong lately for him to have room to care about that. After his mother dies a tick past his nineteenth birthday, Janus finds himself fleeing into the far reaches of Georgia where he meets a man with the most dangerous aura Janus has ever seen. Janus ignores his instincts and falls hard for the old money charm but after their first tryst goes terribly wrong, he shoots the man dead against a sweetgum tree to save his own life. Years later, on the run in the straits of Appalachia, Janus is hiding under a false name and the rickety roof of God’s house with a reverend’s collar around his neck. He preaches lessons someone else wrote a long while back, lying through his teeth, and is perfectly content to go on living the facade until someone new begins coming to service. Maris, a man who seems to come from nowhere, saunters in with an aura like nothing Janus has ever seen before and upends Janus’ life in one fell, beautiful swoop.

161 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 4, 2020

About the author

Isa Arsén is a certified bleeding heart based in South Texas, where she lives with her spouse and a comically small dog.

Her work has been featured in Stone of Madness Press, The McNeese Review, and several independent anthologies and audiovisual projects. Her novels include SHOOT THE MOON (Putnam, 2023), and the forthcoming midcentury drama THE UNBECOMING OF MARGARET WOLF (Putnam, 2025).

When not wrangling prose, Isa is a dialogue engineer & writer for interactive media.

Reviews

[Sally · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novella is short but impactful, and beautifully written. Isa's writing is highly descriptive with a very poetic flow.

Maris is a preacher by necessity, hiding from a mistake in his past, and he meets an unusual member of his congregation. He's not a perfect character by any means, deliberately so for the plot to function, and it was fascinating to see how events unfolded from his perspective. This was a lovely read and I am looking forward to reading more of Isa's work.

[C's · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book can be a bit frustrating to read at times. The prose is dense and too convoluted, I had to reread sentences multiple times to understand what truly happened. I don’t know man, I know there’s a good book in here buried under all this overly descriptive prose.