*Content Warning: Body horror. Infant death. Suicide.*
I did not intend to review this book. But I picked up the audiobook and quickly fell in love with it, and I just had to talk about it.
Dead Boys is my favourite kind of fantasy novel, one which is very hard to fit into an elevator pitch. It’s an epic fantasy, complete with quests, grand journeys, great battles and mighty deeds. It’s a grisly tale of body horror, full of rotting corpses and appalling fates. It’s a heist tale. It’s a pitch-black comedy. It’s a philosophical discourse on how souls trapped forever in decaying physical bodies could face eternity without going insane.
The novel is set in the underworld, though it has little resemblance to most of the afterlives depicted in mythology. Despite the occasional classical reference, this world will be more familiar to players of Dark Souls than to experts on Hell or the Greek underworld. The dead wake up in corpses identical to the ones they left behind in the world of the living. These bodies rot over time. Existence is endless for the dead; bodily integrity is not.
The only tools and materials in the underworld are those the dead bring with them, or that the River Lethe carries from up above. Every object, from a dustbin lid to a sword to a coaster, is extremely precious. The main currency is years of labour, and the resulting economy is based on the work of hundreds of debtors, all of whom have had their faces removed until such time as their term of service is completed.
Jacob is a preservationist, a profession dedicated to repairing other dead people and granting them as much of a semblance of life as possible. Since the dead don’t really feel pain and aren’t inconvenienced by anything less drastic than the loss or breakage of bones, these procedures can be quite extreme, including embalming, replacing skin with leather, and remaking rotten bodies out of wood.
Jacob’s talents make him relatively wealthy and well regarded in Dead City, a vast honeycombed metropolis built from structures that have been washed out of the living world by the Lethe, and have piled up on top of each other over millennia. Dig down far enough in Dead City and you’ll find dead people speaking languages you never knew existed from cultures that have been lost to time.
Wealth, acclaim and status are no longer enough for Jacob—eternity is too great a weight to bear without some higher purpose. He embarks on a quest to find the one living human who ever entered the land of the dead and learn his secrets.
Joining Jacob are:
Remington, a youth who died and lost all memory of his life when he blew his own brains out with a shotgun. Remington is perpetually cheerful and innocent, and has strange powers over the bones of the dead.
Leopold, a gambler, criminal and flamboyant raconteur with his own ambitions. He still wears the noose which snapped his neck and propelled him into death.
As this rotting fellowship travels beneath and beyond Dead City, they encounter—an eternal war, bone giants, skeletal martial artists, mystical sandstorms, eternal drunks, and stories and powers stranger than their own. (Though all based around a handful of rules that maintain consistency throughout the story.)
Despite its grim subject matter, Dead Boys isn’t really a horror novel; there are no shocks or scares as such. It’s certainly disturbing! (One character was almost ready to give birth when she died, and now carries an undead and sentient baby inside her torn womb.) True death, or dissolution, is rarely on the cards, but the possibility of spending forever as an immobile skull, or buried in river mud, is pretty frightening. Still, all this feels similar in tone to the perils that any group of heroes in a grimdark world might face, and it’s refreshing to have characters face a different kind of danger than simple death or capture.
Even grimdark feels like the wrong term for this novel. Squailia writes with an easy, dry humour that makes the morbid realities and crushing existential despair of their setting somehow very bearable. They don’t wallow in the nastiness of it all (and it is pretty nasty in places), they simply pull the reader along on a fun and fascinating adventure through the morbid muck. There’s even a hint of hope here and there, which gives this book about being dead forever a surprisingly uplifting feel. If I could think of any other examples of this sub-genre, I’d be tempted to call it “upbeat awful” or “splatterbright”.
I would have liked to have seen a bit more of Squailia’s grimly amusing underworld, but that’s my only real quibble with the book. Perhaps they intended to write sequels. I was all set to add Squailia to the pantheon of authors like Catherynne M. Valente, Erin Morgenstern, and Josiah Bancroft whose work I watch out for with bated breath. Alas, Squailia wrote one more novel in 2016 and seems to have disappeared from the literary scene since then. Wherever they are, I hope they’re safe and well, and I hope they will one day return to writing SFF.
I’d particularly recommend Dead Boys to fans of Neil Gaiman, Alan Campbell, Jesse Bullington, Mark Lawrence, Joe Abercrombie or Scott Lynch. But anyone who enjoys speculative fiction should give this a look. Horror fans will likely enjoy the intimate details of decay and bodily preservation and all the indignities that unliving flesh can be subjected to. Lovers of dark or epic fantasy will like the adventures, the schemes and the sheer originality of the setting. In general, this novel offers creativity, humour, existential philosophy, and an undead pet crow which nests in its owner’s skull.
Do yourself a favour and check out this grimly hilarious grotesquery.
Dead Boys is available in paperback form, and, at the time of writing, the audiobook version is free with an Audible subscription.
Jennie Ivins