Bones & All (novel)

Bones & All

Author	Camille DeAngelis
Language	English
Genre	Coming of age Horror fiction
Publisher	St. Martin's Press
Publication date	2015
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	304
ISBN	9781250046505
OCLC	904604643

Bones & All (also known by the title Bones and All) is a coming of age horror novel written by Camille DeAngelis, first published in 2015 and later adapted into a feature-length film by the same title in 2022. The book revolves around Maren, an adolescent female cannibal who tries to make a life for herself in rural America despite her urges to eat human flesh. According to the book's acknowledgements section, DeAngelis had just committed to a vegan diet prior to releasing Bones & All, and the book raises various points about the morality associated with killing other living things for food.

Plot summary

Maren, an adolescent girl, has been a "people-eater" ever since she can remember, her earliest kill being a beloved babysitter. She generally attacks anybody for whom she has affection. As a result, she and her mother live in relative hiding and often move from one location to the next after Maren accidentally kills and eats someone. When her mother abandons her, Maren begins to wonder about tracking down her estranged father, whom she's never met before. Venturing from her home, she briefly befriends an older man named Sully, who happens to also be a "people-eater"; his strange mannerisms and behaviours come across as extremely creepy and perverted to Maren but they still end up talking for a while and he invites her to travel around with him, as they share the same affliction and Maren does find camaraderie with the bizarre man. When she wakes up the morning after, Sully leaves a note about how he has already left for his travels and that she should continue on her journey to meet her father. Continuing on her journey, she meets Lee, an adolescent non-conformist and also a "people-eater", although Lee is much friendlier and seems to have more scruples about cannibalism than Sully did.

Maren and Lee spend a long time on the open road, meeting fellow cannibals in rural areas and staying in multiple places along the way. Maren eventually meets her father, and finds out that he is also a cannibal but that he never thought that his daughter was going to be one. Maren's father is distraught by the news and mutilates himself. Maren falls in love with Lee, although they have disagreements about the behaviour of cannibalism itself. While Lee doesn't necessarily enjoy the act but sees it as a necessity, Maren feels empathy for other human beings and doesn't want to hurt them; this causes a schism in her relationship with Lee. Sully, who is revealed to be Maren's grandfather, attacks Maren and is planning on killing and eating her, but Lee intervenes, only to be mortally wounded in the process. As an act of love and devotion, and to please Lee, Maren gives in and eats him, "bones and all", a rite of passage for cannibals like her.

2022 film adaptation

This section is an excerpt from Bones and All.[edit]

Bones and All is a 2022 romantic horror film directed by Luca Guadagnino from a screenplay by David Kajganich, based on the 2015 novel Bones & All by Camille DeAngelis. Set in the late 1980s, the film stars Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet as a pair of young cannibals who develop feelings for each other on a road trip across the United States. Michael Stuhlbarg, André Holland, Chloë Sevigny, David Gordon Green, Jessica Harper, Jake Horowitz, and Mark Rylance appear in supporting roles.

Bones and All had its world premiere at the 79th Venice International Film Festival on September 2, 2022, where it won the Silver Lion for best direction and the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Russell. The film was released theatrically in the United States on November 18, by United Artists Releasing, and elsewhere by Warner Bros. Pictures, with the exception of Italy, where it was distributed by Vision Distribution. The film received positive reviews, with critics praising the performances of Russell, Chalamet and Rylance, Guadagnino's direction, the cinematography, score, and fusion of genres. However, it underperformed at the box office, grossing $15.2 million against a production budget of $16–20 million.

Reception

Publishers Weekly was positive about Bones & All, calling it the "story of a young ghoul's coming of age" and praising its approach to modern issues. Bones & All won the Alex Awards under the category "Top 10 Adult Books That Appeal to Teens". The Montclarion was more critical, with reviewer Anna Mccabe saying of Bones & All, "Maren’s character is not easy to love, after being emotionally neglected her entire life by her mother and abandoned by her father before birth, her decision-making skills are not her strongest suit, making it very frustrating to support her... Maybe too many years of unsupervised access to the internet as a child has rotten [sic] my perception of horror, but the scariest thing about this book was the constant eating of beans straight out of the can." Mccabe later in her review stated, however, that she enjoyed the book overall.

Some reviewers noted Bones & All for its allegory of veganism and feminism. Our Hen House, an animal rights activism website, gave a positive review of the book, although pointed out that the book makes no overt effort to raise awareness of veganism. Time Magazine, while writing on the 2022 film adaptation, noted that the "people-eaters" in the original book versus the film are ghouls with supernatural abilities, and that this makes life alone much more dangerous for Maren since predatory men like Sully are just as powerful as she is, if not more-so. The film does not explain or suggest this, instead portraying the characters as just human cannibals.