The Ironic Skeletons

Paleontology, sexualized cosmic horror, and a textbook descent into madness dominate Smith’s nihilistic neo-Decadent debut, whose flourishes reference Lovecraft but fail to build upon his oeuvre. Fossils keep disappearing on D.W. Lambert, a misanthropic, atheistic, bisexual West Virginia archaeologist. First to go missing is an unusual hominid skeleton discovered in Chad, then a colleague’s impossible Triassic trilobite, then a mislabeled fragment in the Pittsburgh museum where she works—and once they’re gone, no one but D.W. remembers the specimens. Maybe they never existed at all and D.W.’s historically shaky, drug-fueled grip on reality is coming apart—or maybe a mysterious force is intervening to hide the nonhuman past. Smith’s deliberately tuned style—restrained declamation shattered by violent imagistic hallucinations—melds only partially and self-consciously with its delivery, while inventive structural conceits are undermined by a slim plot padded with repetition. While obsessions with religion, perversion, and social decay neatly evoke Decadent literature, modern readers will likely find these concerns more pedestrian than shocking. Aficionados of contemporary cosmic horror by such authors as Caitlin Kiernan or Premee Mohamed will long for more substance from Smith’s stylish but undeveloped work. (Mar.)