Necromancy Cottage, Or, The Black Art of Gnawing On Bones

Necromancy Cottage, Or, The Black Art of Gnawing On Bones

File:First edition cover of Necromancy Cottage, Or, The Black Art of Gnawing On Bones.png First edition
Author	Rebecca Maye Holiday
Illustrator
Country	Canada
Language	English French
Genre	horror coming-of-age fantasy
Publisher	Sea Holly Books
Publication date	2019
Pages
ISBN	9781777682118 Search this book on . (print edition)
OCLC	1317770926

Necromancy Cottage, Or, The Black Art of Gnawing On Bones (sometimes referred to as just "Necromancy Cottage") is a 2019 French-Canadian horror fantasy novel by Rebecca Maye Holiday. The book follows Cassandra "Casey" Harris, an American teenager who runs away from the ambiguous "mainland" to live with a group of sorcerers and folk magicians on an otherwise deserted island. The story is an allegorical exploration of global politics and human exploitation, while written in the style of a standard coming-of-age Bildungsroman.

Plot

Casey Harris, a fifteen-year-old girl, runs away from home to escape her divorced parents and sexually-abusive stepfather after her older sister, Grace Harris, is killed in a car crash. Boarding a ferry to the mysterious Clover Isle (which she found in an old library book), Casey quickly befriends Scott McDonald, a boy who runs the island's lone operating business (a diner), and also Holly Nemov, a Ukrainian expatriate and errand boy who is apprenticed to Desmond Trauer, a German-American necromancer living in a cottage kept running by black magic. Casey is taken in by Desmond immediately, and soon decides to live there until her own life is sorted out. Holly warns her against this, and Casey is forcibly bound to Clover Isle by Desmond, who possesses Holly to perform a sealing ritual on the beach. On Halloween (coincidentally also Holly's 16th birthday, which he has no interest in celebrating), Casey joins Scott and his sister Celia in a variety of satanic rituals and a bizarre, dangerous game in which they all skate on sea ice frozen up in the sky. Casey learns that Holly's family is dead, and that they had moved to the ghost town Kadykchan Village in Russia after developing cancer and severe ailments from the Chernobyl Disaster. Holly is being pursued by a "Black Dog" that wants to control him by harvesting his organs in a ritual sacrifice, which Holly evades by hiding on Clover Isle.

Casey discovers that Holly is killing tourists (unwillingly, under Desmond's control) and dumping the corpses in an abandoned swimming pool. With the help of a witch, Aisling St. Clair, who lives in a deserted motel on Clover Isle, Casey and Holly aim to stop Desmond, but he stabs Holly, nearly chokes Celia to death, and becomes mentally unhinged, leading Casey to defeat him by invoking her own latent celestial magic. Desmond, reduced in power and much more frail than his former self, makes amends with Holly, and Casey, Holly, Scott and Celia return to the mainland, booking a hotel room next to a spacious shopping mall. The four characters fail to adapt to the normalcy of the mainland; Celia hoards food, Scott eats all the food, Holly becomes increasingly self-destructive and more paranoid, and Casey is left trying to blend in without being seen by police and by Dana Harris (her kind-hearted stepmother). She finds Holly acting neurotically and making disturbing comments, referring to himself as an "organ donor - unwillingly" for the "Black Dog" and stabbing himself with a cake knife. Casey learns that she can use her celestial magic to read minds, and in Holly's mind, she finds his past too horrific to investigate. Casey talks to the ghost of her sister, and rents an apartment for herself and her friends. She also grapples with the reality that her stepfather raped her multiple times, and Holly promises to kill the stepfather if he ever tracks her down. She learns that Holly is a sea demon (resurrected after a drowning accident in childhood) who will eventually be initiated and will probably live a short life as a result. In spite of this, she falls in love with him and has him vow his soul to her. Knowing that their future together will be limited, they move to a lighthouse on another island called Seabiscuit Cove.

Themes

Necromancy Cottage, Or, The Black Art of Gnawing On Bones features themes of libertarianism (often represented by the color yellow in the text), political corruption, human rights, exploitation, freedom and death. While often indirectly mentioned, at times the book does make blatant mentions of The Ukrainian Famine, The Holocaust, forced organ procurement, child abuse, child labor, illegal immigration, a drunk driving accident, the Jonestown mass suicides, trauma and murder. The book also heavily deals with the subject of anti-communism, and uses colors and poetic verse to convey messages. Socialism is represented in green, communism in red, democracy in blue, and libertarianism in yellow. While written like a typical young adult fantasy novel, Necromancy Cottage, Or, The Black Art of Gnawing On Bones is unrated and categorized as an adult trade fiction title.

Additional sources

Rebecca Maye Holiday, unable to add direct citations in the character dialogue of her fictional text, added a note on the copyright page of Necromancy Cottage, Or, The Black Art of Gnawing On Bones in all published editions of the book. The note states: "The author would like to acknowledge the following public domain works briefly quoted in character dialogue throughout Necromancy Cottage, Or, The Black Art of Gnawing on Bones: “The Sorcerer's Apprentice” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - The De vita libri tres (Three Books on Life) by Marsilio Ficino - The third and last Book of Magick, or Occult Philosophy by Henry Cornelius Agrippa." The book's cover art and interior art was created by Rebecca Maye herself, and copyrighted alongside the book.

Publication

Necromancy Cottage, Or, The Black Art of Gnawing On Bones was published under the Canadian imprint Sea Holly Books. According to Rebecca Maye Holiday, she had plans to write a "quasi-sequel" to it, but found the book difficult to work with due to it being challenged and censored for its anti-communism message and it being plagiarized by somebody on American print-on-demand press Kindle Direct Publishing, which damaged her attribution to the book on web browser searches due to metadata imports coming from the plagiarized editions' ISBN numbers into Goodreads and Google Books. The book was eventually archived by Library and Archives Canada for protection. During an interview, Rebecca Maye said of her book, "For Necromancy Cottage, Or, The Black Art of Gnawing on Bones, I had done some research on esoteric and occult magic, all of which was integrated into the novel. The story is set on a fictional island, but that island was based loosely on real locations throughout Eastern Canada: Plaster Rock, Glace Bay, Campobello Island, Grand Manan Island, and from an aesthetic visual standpoint, Bridgewater, Lunenburg and Pictou, various rural places near the sea in my province."

L.S. Popovich praised Necromancy Cottage, Or, The Black Art of Gnawing On Bones in a critical review, comparing the book to Hocus Pocus and Coraline and stating, "I expected some fluff, but it is well-paced, and makes for a hearty brew of genre and literary writing, a whimsical but dark exploration of complex characters."

See also

• Krabat and the Sorcerer's Mill

References

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