bibliosizzle

THE SIZZLE 🔥

Rating: ★★★★★
Content: Minor Mentions of Sexual Assault
Genre: Horror / Literature / Adult
Vibe: Ghosts • Historical Fiction • Serial Widower
Series: Standalone

MY THOUGHTS (SPOILERS BELOW)

What an odd, unsettling, yet strangely beautiful book. On the surface, Even Your Bones Would Do is a horror novel about a serial widower. It’s a ghost story about a haunted house inhabited by a demon and the women he’s killed. It’s a forbidden romance between two ill-fated, star-crossed lovers. However, I think maybe that it’s trying to be so much more than any of those things.

What if this isn’t really a story about ghosts or demons at all? What if it’s a story about what it means to be a woman? To be unseen. Unheard. Disrespected. To be expected to marry, to sacrifice, to obey, regardless of your own happiness. To hide your pain, your suffering, your abuse, because who would believe you anyway? Who would take your side?

It’s a story about yearning for something more, only to discover that more isn’t necessarily what you imagined. Sometimes the thing you thought would save you is the very thing that destroys you. The ghosts of his former wives; are they really ghosts? Or are they ancestors? Echoes of the women who came before us, women who suffered and sacrificed and disappeared into their marriages, but who couldn’t save us from becoming exactly like them?

Julius is, on his face, the perfect villain. Because demon or not, he embodies the worst of what women have been expected to endure from men for centuries. He devours everything that comes before him. Claims everything as his own. His expectations are enormous, his entitlement even greater. His ego is as oversized as the house he so desperately aggrandizes, perhaps to compensate for everything he lacks. Isn’t that interesting? A man so desperate to possess women, yet so utterly incapable of understanding them.

At the end of the day, don’t we all sometimes wish men could be a little more like women?

Or maybe I’m getting too philosophical. Let’s go a bit deeper.

What if Marie, the first wife, is really the original version of herself? What if each subsequent wife represents another piece of the same woman? Another part of herself surrendered, suppressed, or destroyed in the name of marriage, motherhood, and the promise of a home? What if these aren’t separate women at all, but the accumulated remains of one woman, slowly dismantled by a man who believed he was entitled to every last piece of her.

Like so many women, I can relate to that. I was married once before. I was young, innocent, naive, and so completely in love. When that marriage fell apart, the woman I had been up until that moment died. Not literally, of course, but the pain and despair were so enormous that surviving meant becoming someone else. I had to harden myself. I had to learn to live again. And to do that, I had to put the woman I used to be somewhere I wouldn’t have to look at her anymore.

Even now, I sometimes pretend she never existed.

Every once in a while, little pieces of her rise to the surface. A memory. A feeling. Some forgotten part of myself. And I look at her almost like an old friend I had to grow apart from in order to survive. It hurts a little less to remember her now. But it still hurts. It’s not too much of a stretch to wonder if her ideals were just a dream. I’ve moved on. I’ve built a life full of beauty, joy, love, children, and success. But something was taken from me that I will never get back. That youth. That promise. That innocence. The ability to love someone with absolute vulnerability, to give myself completely without fear of what might happen if they decided I wasn’t enough.

He took those things from me and never looked back. The people who love me now, my husband, my children, will never really know that woman. They know who I became. They know the person who survived. But they will never know who I was before. Not truly.

So perhaps that’s what happened to April. Perhaps that’s what happened to Marie, and to every woman who came after her. Perhaps, in some way, that’s what happens to all of us. We surrender pieces of ourselves over and over again. For our husbands. For our children. For the lives we’re expected to build. For a society that sees the finished product but rarely acknowledges everything we had to sacrifice to become it. Sometimes those pieces are given willingly. Sometimes they’re taken. And sometimes we don’t even realize they’re gone until we catch a glimpse of the woman we used to be and barely recognize her.

Maybe that’s what makes this story so haunting. Not the demon. Not the dead wives. Not even the house, but the possibility that the ghosts are simply the women we used to be. The ones we buried so we could keep living.

Maybe I’m reading far too much into a horror novel about a murderous demon and his unfortunate collection of wives.

Maybe I’m just being melodramatic.

READ IT IF… 🔥

You love gothic horror that gives you more to think about than the things lurking in the shadows. If haunted houses, morally monstrous men, doomed romance, and unsettling female ghosts are your kind of thing, there’s plenty here to sink your teeth into.