Our Take

TJ Klune is best known for The House in the Cerulean Sea and its particular brand of cozy, warmhearted fantasy, which makes The Bones Beneath My Skin a genuine surprise. This is Klune in thriller mode -- tense, propulsive, and genuinely scary in stretches -- while still carrying the emotional generosity that defines his work. The result is something that defies easy categorization: a cabin thriller with the soul of a found-family story, set in 1995 Oregon and shot through with the paranoid energy of that era's best genre fiction. The book's secret weapon is Artemis Darth Vader herself. Klune writes children with rare authenticity, and Artemis -- strange, funny, wise, and utterly herself -- is one of his best characters. The dynamic between Nate, Alex, and Artemis gives the thriller stakes an emotional weight that most genre fiction can't manage, and Klune earns every moment of it. The Stranger Things comparison that follows the book around is apt but incomplete -- this is darker and more interior than that show, less interested in nostalgia than in the specific terror of being responsible for something you can't fully understand. Readers who loved Becky Chambers' A Psalm for the Wild-Built for its quiet emotional intelligence, or who were gripped by Blake Crouch's Dark Matter for its genre-bending momentum, will find this a deeply satisfying read. One of Klune's most underrated works.