![]() ![]() His stories are moral, for his anti-heroes receive fitting fates, and honest, for his people face biting truths, as when a ghoul hears from a corpse she's eaten, "I knew life and love and happiness. ![]() ![]() If McNaughton’s work is macabre, with graphic sex and violence aplenty, it is also funny, delighting in the human comedy, especially via dramatic irony (e.g., when a mob thinks they’re rescuing a child from a ghoul), and in the well-turned phrase or the piquant word (e.g., "This apparently caused him to miss a fire or massacre or other popular diversion, for when he emerged in the evening, the street outside his house pullulated with quidnuncs"). Howard, Jack Vance, and Tannith Lee, all informed by McNaughton's voice and vision. The stories read like a meld of Clark Ashton Smith, H. Brian McNaughton's World Fantasy Award-winning collection of mordant epic horror tales, The Throne of Bones (1997), is set in a world of decadent cities like Crotalorn (home of the Dreamers’ Hill necropolis), Sythiphore (home of piscine eroticists), and Fandragord (home of evil) where aristocrats, scholars, cultists, poets, prostitutes, barbarians, necromancers, the undead, ghouls, and the like pursue love, art, life, and death. ![]()
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