Kingdom of Needle and Bone
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4.5 • 20 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
We live in an age of wonders.
Modern medicine has conquered or contained many of the diseases that used to carry children away before their time, reducing mortality and improving health. Vaccination and treatment are widely available, not held in reserve for the chosen few. There are still monsters left to fight, but the old ones, the simple ones, trouble us no more.
Or so we thought. For with the reduction in danger comes the erosion of memory, as pandemics fade from memory into story into fairy tale. Those old diseases can’t have been so bad, people say, or we wouldn’t be here to talk about them. They don’t matter. They’re never coming back.
How wrong we could be.
It begins with a fever. By the time the spots appear, it’s too late: Morris’s disease is loose on the world, and the bodies of the dead begin to pile high in the streets. When its terrible side consequences for the survivors become clear, something must be done, or the dying will never stop. For Dr. Isabella Gauley, whose niece was the first confirmed victim, the route forward is neither clear nor strictly ethical, but it may be the only way to save a world already in crisis. It may be the only way to atone for her part in everything that’s happened.
She will never be forgiven, not by herself, and not by anyone else. But she can, perhaps, do the right thing.
We live in an age of monsters.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Grant (Into the Drowning Deep), a pseudonym for Seanan McGuire, brings an infectious new horror to life in this terse novella. After Dr. Isabelle "Izzy" Gauley's niece, Lisa Morris, becomes patient zero for a deadly new strain of the measles, 10 million people die. Lisa's mother, Brooke, a pharmacist, tells Izzy that the waves of death are only just beginning. This disease has altered human immune systems, making them incapable of being inoculated, and susceptible to sicknesses long thought eradicated. Izzy makes a plan: take the survivors and bring them to an island, keeping them safe and healthy until a cure can be found. Cunning, calculating, and extremely ambitious, she creates a paradise that she will protect at all costs. But her guilt over Lisa's death and the secrets of her past continue to haunt her, even as she seems to succeed. Terrifyingly foreboding, peppered with news releases and sections of testimonies, this scathing critique of the anti-vaccination movement hints at a dark future ahead. Readers will be pulled along even as they try to look away.
