| Title | : | Elyora |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0994550626 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780994550620 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 112 |
| Publication | : | First published April 12, 2013 |
As day turns to night, the sanctuary of the rambling house becomes a terrifying alternate reality of memories peeling back onto themselves to expose secrets and paranoia dating back to 1942.
To escape Elyora and return to 2012, Jo must remember who she is and find Benny and Hal before they succumb to the same fate as those who came before them.
Elyora Reviews
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I won this book in a Goodreads Giveaway. It has 99 pages.
This book started off well with a group of three musicians traveling to a gig when their van breaks down. When they go for help it looks like they have gone back in time to the 1970s. After that things start to get very confusing. I found myself rereading pages because I was lost and had no idea what was going on. -
This was a pleasant surprise from a totally unknown (to me) australian author. Better than expected from an average free kindle read and certainly better than a regular female genre writer. Starts off in a wholly unoriginal scenario...trio of youngsters (a band in this case) whose van stalls forcing them to take a detour in a small town that time seemingly forgot (or did the town forget the time, read to find out). But from that point on Cleghorn makes the story completely unique, very much her own with the intricate plotting and strong writing that bespeak of a considerable talent. It was short listed for Aurealis award in Australia. Original possession tale slipping and sliding through time. A small town you'd never want to visit. Very haunting, very atmospheric. Very impressive. Recommended.
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Jodi Cleghorn's 'River of Bones' is a fast paced tale of horror set in rural Queensland. As an American working in this part of the Great Artesian Basin, I know the mentioned landmarks and recognize the imaginary dangers due to not knowing the history of places where I've stopped for directions, petrol, Lamingtons, or overnight accommodations. Like Zepp's album, 'In Through the Out Door' there's something creepy about entering these places with no understanding of the central stories.'River of Bones' gives readers a front row seat to a nightmare place where the past is central to the present and where the river is dangerous and even the rain is not right. When visiting former small towns off the New England Highway keep repeating to yourself, "You're only ever one step away from knowing nothing."
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Loved it! It evokes such a strong feeling of place, that's reinforced by the style of writing. Transitions well from the opening to, well... things getting complicated and messy.
Definitely going to check out more of Jodi's work. -
River of Bones was previously published by the Australian Review of Fiction under the title of Elyora, the name of the town featured in the novella. I read it back in January and by a stroke of good fortune happened to read Dr Lisa L Hannett’s article, Wide Open Fear: Australian Horror and Gothic Fiction at the same time. Hannett introduced me to the concept of unheimlich, a term that roughly translates to an object, situation or place that has a quality of being familiar yet foreign at the same time.
The term describes River of Bones perfectly. The setting is familiar, yet strange and Cleghorn presents a story that straddles the borderline between the everyday, the mundane and the disturbing. She presents an Australian landscape and characters that I know and manages to embed a “wrongness”, a fractured reality that builds until the true horror is revealed.
Australia is the sort of country where a wrong turn can kill you, either the people, the animals or the environment. The initial opening of the tale ( a short prologue was added with the new edition) starts off with a band in their combi-van traveling an outback road to a gig. Most Australian’s have that experience of the road trip, of turning off into towns bypassed by the highway, of taking shortcuts that turnout to be long-ways-around. Elyora could be anyone of a hundred once-were-towns in my state.
Jo, Benny and Hal, members of the band Faunabate, have no idea what they’re in for when their car suddenly breaks down on the way to their first gig.
Their nearest town? Elyora. Upon arrival it quickly becomes clear that this is not your normal town. Why are all the magazines dated at 1974?
Why have all of their clocks stopped? And where exactly have all the people gone?There are some towns you don't ever want to visit.
And Elyora is one of them.
I have become a fan of Stephen King in recent years, more so for the emotional weight he embeds in his focus on character -I was more torn up over the love story in 22.11.63 than the Kennedy story. Though he does take a long time getting there. With River of Bones Cleghorn somehow manages to deliver that same weight, that same investment in character that I feel with King, but without such a long run-up. I would have been fine with just the emotional interplay, the tragedy in this novella, but Cleghorn delivered a double punch of emotional and very deftly placed, visceral horror. The ending was particularly gutting with respect to both.
Cleghorn’s rendering of Elyora and its inhabitants is so vivid that I see possibilities for it as an independent horror film in much the same vein as Wolf Creek. Hannett did not quote River of Bones as being part of the tradition of Australian Gothic ( she probably hadn’t read it at the time) but it strikes me as one of the better recent examples. -
Wow! Pleasantly suprised with this one! For a light read it was quite tense, imaginative and actually packed an emotional wallop. And it was to the point! No never-ending boring passages just to fill the pages. Also i can't agree it felt hurried, it had a nice pace, picking up when it needed. Of course you could have more backstory to the characters but this is not action-packed thriller, it's more of a gothic romance almost and it works perfectly as it is.
ps.
they could a make a decent script for a quality tv movie out of it -
Just finished reading... It's an interesting enough concept, but i personally thought it didn't deliver.
I could not relate to the characters in the story, also I thought the characters all came off as one dimensional and they wasn't really anything different one character from another, they all felt pretty much the same.
As for the plot, well you could get most of that from the synopsis. Some people may enough this book, but it wasn't for me. -
I understand Jodi Cleghorn's River of Bones was originally written as a novella named Elyora. I like the evocative sound of Elyora, the name of the haunted country town in which the story is set, better than the generic spooky title the story has ended up with, but that's my last major complaint. And anyway it's not as if River of Bones is misleading in any way.
River of Bones is the story of a band falling apart on the verge of breaking in. At least, that's what's happening when their tour van breaks down in a sleepy Australian country town that appears to be literally stuck in the past. As they become acquainted with a handful of locals, some of them friendlier than others, they begin to realise that Elyora is a very nasty place to get lost in.
The setup to this novel is indistinguishable from any number of gore-filled slasher flicks, in which pretty young people encounter outback/backwoods/hillbilly chainsaw/cultist/cannibal crazies and are grotesquely murdered. Cleghorn does something more interesting with the trope, though, overlaying her bloodbath with gothic imagery, restless ghosts, secret government experiments, Australian xenophobia and a passionate if disturbing romance. With so many ingredients, River could have been a cluttered mess, but Cleghorn pulls it off (although I admit I needed a second readthrough to figure out how the government experiment part fitted in).
Cleghorn has a great eye for the small details that bring her 1970's-era Elyora to life. River is as gloomy and atmospheric as you'd hope in a gothic novel, the character dialogue is sharp and the horror scenes are memorably gruesome. There were plenty of effective horror moments, though as a parent I think the worst was one character's alarming indifference to child safety. Overall River of Bones is what I look for in horror - inventive, emotional and gruesome. -
The blurb was fascinating. The cursed town stuck in 1974 is a great idea. I was excited to find when I started reading that the cursed town is on the New England Tableland, 4 km from the New England Highway and about 5 hours from Brisbane. Because, you see, I live on the New England Tableland, just outside a village that is 4 km from the New England Highway and rather farther than 5 hours from Brisbane but I probably don't drive as fast as three young musicians in a van.
So as a geography pedant, I was disappointed. We have a splendid gothic landscape here, with a very big sky, endless wind, paddocks outlined by lines of dying pine trees, plenty of abandoned farmhouses, and most un-Australian summers- it snows in November sometimes. See here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubewB...
The town in this book is hemmed in by claustrophobic bush, has traditionally scorching Australian summers, and has jacaranda in it, bougainvillea, rainbow lorikeets - plants and birds of the steamy lowlands.
But that's not important right now.
I am not a big horror fan, but the horror I do enjoy has a gradually building sense of terror and mystery. This book doesn't have that. The narrative (for perfectly good reasons) has a disconnected dream-like quality, but for me it became too disconnected and too dream-like too quickly to develop anything remotely like suspense. -
There's not a lot I can say about 'River of Bones' without spoiling it, other than that it's damned good - a claustrophobic, feverish rush of horror; a morass of bad memory, sexual threat and the harsh Australian bush. Nothing is what it seems and nothing goes in the direction you expect; everything is false, reality falls apart to reknit itself and the storm is coming. Coming fast.
If I have any complaints, it's that I wish the story had been a little bit longer, just to explore the space of Elyora a little more and the movement of the narrative within it. (Plus there are a few typos, but so it goes.) But there's a lot to be said for getting in, nailing the story as hard and fast as you can and dropping the mic to end the set, and that's just what Jodi Cleghorn does.
Looking forward to more work from this author. Yes indeed. -
'River of Bones' is contemporary Australian Gothic at its spine-chilling best. Jodi Cleghorn writes a taut, tense supernatural thriller that merges lyricism with a fast pace and perfectly captures the particular beauty and underlying menace of the Australian landscape alongside the small bitternesses and old secrets that drive small-town life. She casts a wide net - 'River of Bones' has secret government shenanigans, river spirits, weird architecture, temporal slippage, sex, murder and music, plus a pitch-perfect portrait of a struggling, fractious newbie rock group imploding on the gig circuit - but at its bleeding, pumping heart, this is a love story, though a far from ordinary one. In Elyora, to love is to pay a high price. And (as per David Foster Wallace) every love story is a ghost story...
Highly recommended, and well deserving of its Aurealis nomination. -
Intense Atmosphere
The mood in this book is very well done. The reader finds themselves cemented in the town of Elyora. Descriptions are vivid and also written in a literary manner (but never self-indulgent), that feeds the imagination. There were many sentences in this novel that I highlighted in my e-reader... they were simply so gorgeous and impactful that I could appreciate the craftsmanship of the writing itself.
I feel that the protagonist accepted some of the early freaky things a little too well.
This book has two distinct parts, the second part being more abstract and horror filled. The ending was a surprise because I thought I was missing a page, or that I'd mistakenly flicked past it. There were still many loose ends that I wanted to know about. I don't know if there is a sequel but there is a lot of room for one. I would read it. -
For a chiller with completely unexpected twists, this book hits it spot on. I couldn't stop. And even when I had to, I started having nightmares associated with the story. Jodi does a wonderful job of making everything seem so normal. The characters fly off the page with distinct personalities and beautiful back stories that the reader seems to know by instinct alone. With each little promise, each moment of uncertainty, the book ramps up to a complete and total disaster. It's a beautiful mess of terror and horror and magic and death. There is so much depth that I would definitely need a reread to catch all of the ins and outs of these characters. Definitely one to check out.
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*A free copy of this book was received through Goodreads giveaway.
The premise of this book is good, and I was so excited when I get it. But it was hard for me to get into the story because I can't quite grasp of what the hell is happening. Everything seems to be rushed since the very first page and the writing makes me really hard to distinguish each narratives. I also feel like I was reading a summary instead of the whole story. There are so many parts that I really want to get more into so I can comprehend the story better. In conclusion, it has the potential to be a good book, but everything in it feels so rushed needs to be expanded more. -
Fascinating horror story set in Australia. I was very drawn in by this one and read it quickly. I plan to read it again before writing a full review. It's a novella so it was a fast read. I was left wanting more Australian gothic horror in this style. An added bonus of reading this book was that another reviewer drew my attention to Lisa Hannett's great article Wide Open Fear: Australian Horror and Gothic Fiction.
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River of Bones by Jodi Cleghorn is the ultimate, creepy, keep-all-the-lights-on book. A near ghost town in the middle of nowhere in Australia, Elyora is a town outside of time hiding secrets only hinted at. This book is suspenseful, mysterious, and terrifying. Often all at the same time. I was biting my nails the entire time I was reading it.
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Beautifully descriptive writing, in a spooky tale that has you turning the pages to find out what's going on Elyora.
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I really couldn't finish this...
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Book Review: River of Bones
By Jodi Cleghorn
Super Natural thrillers (or horror stories) are not my thing. However, I’ve met Jodie a few times and some people I know highly recommended this book, so I decided to give it a go. I’m glad that I did.
This review is a bit long in coming; I read the book months ago. It’s one of a number of books I read, and want to review, last year. The good thing about ‘River of Bones’ is that the story is still very clear in my mind. That is, the story is memorable, in a good way. It is also thought provoking.
The story starts with a typical setup for a Super Natural/Horror story. Mysterious happenings in a small isolated town, followed by a group of young people stranded in said town. However, the story does not follow the typical path from there. The truth is that it took such interesting turns that it lost me once or twice. I found myself rereading some section before I understood what was going on. The good thing about the story is that I wanted to know. I never lost interest. I struggled to put it down and finished it in record time, for me.
It’s not a long story; great for something read on a quiet afternoon or while commuting.
If you are looking for something a little different, something good, River of Bones by Jodi Cleghorn is worth buying.
If you liked (or disliked) this post please leave a comment. You could also like my page on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter. -
Doing another short fiction round-up on my blog; review there soon, but the way it's coming out, it resists breaking up into individual reviews.
