Near the Bone by Christina Henry
I couldn’t have made a better choice than to pick up Christina Henry’s cabin in the woods story, Near the Bone, for the first time on a snowy weekend in January. The critically-acclaimed 2021 horror-thriller novel opens with Mattie, a young-ish woman of indeterminate age, stumbling upon the gruesome scene of a dead fox in the remote, snowy mountain woods where she lives. It’s clearly not the work of a bear or wolf, but something more sophisticated in its violence.
While thoughts of what might’ve torn the animal apart are scary, what’s even more frightening is Mattie’s day-to-day reality: her “husband” is a much older, extremely abusive and religious, conspiracy-prone zealot, who kidnapped her away from her family when she was just a kid. She’s been forced into being his wife (essentially his slave) in their small, dingy cabin ever since. Between a potential monster lurking in the woods outside their home and the horrors she faces within it, someone owes Mattie the world’s biggest Christmas present.
