“How about you go be immortal at brunch?”

6. The Bog – Michael Talbot

When Brad makes the call to tell Prof. David Macauley they’ve found a bog body in one of the places that Macauley scouted to try and find something exactly as important as a bog body, it will turn the Macauley family’s world upside down. They’ll be moving to unfriendly and downright weird Fenchurch St. Jude and dealing with a marquis and some real old ways and magic. I’m not super keen on magic and magical resolutions. Sometimes it just gets ridiculous, even for horror novels, but here it works out better than I would have expected because Talbot really does manage to tie the magic to the pursuit of knowledge, which definitely would be super tempting for a professor like Macauley looking for his big discovery that will put him on the map. When the person who has to give permission for the excavation is also your landlord and dangling the most knowledge of the past you could ever have in front of you, it’s more of a conundrum.

One thing that feeds into past knowledge and that I also found more enjoyable about The Bog was that it occasionally dips into the actual past when the first bog body they find was being sacrificed. Usually it’s just what can this preserved sacrifice do for the characters or unleash by being removed, not, who is this person in the bog and I also really liked the description of how they can remove the bog body, what is further sacrificed to find more out about the body, and how to still keep it nice and preserved. I want some foundational methods in my bog body story before we get to all the weirdo magic and demon excrement and problems that arise with inbreeding and being scared of moths.

 

Can magical and important artifacts be found in a towel sitting on a bed? Pickles and Murderface will soon know the truth. Soon.