On Halloween 1963, eleven-year-old Chuck Coolidge and his brother Danny are lost in a toxic smog covering the steel town of Slippery Elm, Pennsylvania. When the smog lifts, half the town is sick and twenty people are dead. And Danny is missing.
​Now, over twenty years later, Chuck's teenage daughter Frank plots escape from this “busted and disgusted” town. When a child is found in the river, murdered, investigators link the crime to the disappearance of Danny in ’63, and Frank’s life is turned upside down. In the face of her worst fears, she must uncover her family’s dark past if she wants to keep her sister Boots from the hands of The State. Led to discover the unimaginable truth about Danny’s disappearance, LIES IN BONE culminates in a shocking eleventh-hour reveal and an emotionally charged finale.
Told by a tart-tongued young woman with a love of Bruce Springsteen, LIES IN BONE is at once a mystery and coming-of-age tale fueled by dark secrets involving love, murder, and the truths worth lying for.
On Halloween 1963, eleven-year-old Chuck Coolidge and his brother Danny are lost in a toxic smog covering the steel town of Slippery Elm, Pennsylvania. When the smog lifts, half the town is sick and twenty people are dead. And Danny is missing.
​Now, over twenty years later, Chuck's teenage daughter Frank plots escape from this “busted and disgusted” town. When a child is found in the river, murdered, investigators link the crime to the disappearance of Danny in ’63, and Frank’s life is turned upside down. In the face of her worst fears, she must uncover her family’s dark past if she wants to keep her sister Boots from the hands of The State. Led to discover the unimaginable truth about Danny’s disappearance, LIES IN BONE culminates in a shocking eleventh-hour reveal and an emotionally charged finale.
Told by a tart-tongued young woman with a love of Bruce Springsteen, LIES IN BONE is at once a mystery and coming-of-age tale fueled by dark secrets involving love, murder, and the truths worth lying for.
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THE FOG SNUCK IN over the wooded road, but Chuck didn’t care. He could bike this route blindfolded, and anyway the fog might lift at any time.
“I can’t see,” his brother yelled from behind. “Wait for me. I’m scared.”
Chuck didn’t look back. Instead, he slid his Spiderman mask off and kept his gaze inside the triangular shaft of light spilling from his handlebars. He held his breath—the smell was sickening, like the egg he found cracked open behind Ruth’s stove.
“The fog stinks, Chucky,” came the reedy voice. “What’s that smell?” Silence followed—except for the swish of two sets of spindly tires squeaking over pavement and the flutter and flap of cheap plastic costumes.Â
Chuck reached inside the pumpkin-shaped vessel dangling from a handlebar and extracted a purple jawbreaker roughly the size of a golf ball. With the aid of his front teeth, he slipped it from its wrapper. The tartness made him wince; then came sweetness that almost made him swoon out loud.
Out of the fog came another holler. “I’m scared, Chucky. I can’t see.”
“Pedal faster, dummy,” Chuck shouted, purple spittle drenching his chin. “There ain’t going to be no candy left if we don’t hurry.”
“I’m scared, Chucky,” his brother piped from behind. Way behind.
That distant whimper and the thought of missing out on even one morsel of candy put fury into Chuck’s peddling. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the faint blue outline of Huckleberry Hound flicker out of sight.
The soundless night descended on him like ink spilling from a leaky pen. Branches, mostly bare, strangled the road. An owl, which sounded to be close by, let out one hoo-ah-hoo. Then came another lone hoot, this one more mournful. Something black whooshed through his pool of light; the fog quivered against his cheeks. He felt his spine stiffen and the hairs on his neck stand up. It’s just an old owl. Don’t be a wuss like your dumb brother.
His eyes and throat burning, Chuck pushed on into the darkness—the whole time listening for the flap of his brother’s dime-store costume. Nothing. The night was weirdly still and quiet.
Chuck thought of his mother Ruth’s stupid-faced delight in the presence of her youngest son draped in Huckleberry Hound’s likeness. “I could eat you up, Danny boy,” she’d cooed as the boys mounted their bicycles two hours earlier.
Now—his eyes pinched closed against the fog—Chuck coasted, squeezing his nostrils with two fingers.
“Danny, where are you?” he yelled out, feeling the soupy air fill his lungs.
He opened his eyes and looped back around, the light on his bike producing an arc of glistening, damp haze. Up ahead, a bicycle—a Schwinn Hornet like his, minus the headlight—lay in the grass just off the pavement. Next to it, the mouth of a plastic pumpkin spilled chocolate bars, bubble gum, and Jolly Ranchers. Chuck jumped off his bike and let it fall over the candy-strewn ground.
“Where are you, Danny?” After a moment—the fog getting denser, fouler—he tried again. “Where are you, Danny!”
Turning in blind circles, he called out again. And again.
On the ground in the cone-shaped glare of his headlight, he spied Danny’s Huckleberry Hound mask frozen in its insidious grin. Chuck’s heart stood still. His breathing slowed and then stopped altogether. After a moment, he exhaled, and with the air in his lungs came tears that puddled on his lower lashes and ran like cold creeks down his wind-stiffened face. He picked up the mask and stood motionless. Rage churned in his belly. He hated his brother with his red sniffling nose and perpetually Jell-O-stained lips.
Fingers hooked through the hollowed eyes of the mask, the fog condensing around him, Chuck pictured his mother dabbing medicine on his brother’s elbows and knees (medicine that turned the blood to dark yellow) before she would slash at Chuck’s backside with a belt. All because that little shit fell off his bike.
“Come on out, Danny boy,” Chuck shouted into the fog. “I’m not getting blamed for this.”
He picked up his bike and walked into the brush, using the headlight to illume his path.
“Come on out, Danny!” He retched on the rancid air. “I’m not getting whipped for this.”
Branches poked him, and with each poke his voice went out into the woods. “Where are you?” Another poke. “This ain’t funny.”
With his right hand, he ripped his Spiderman chest open and stepped out of the encasement, leaving it lying like a snakeskin on sticks, leaves, and dirt.
He sucked one more intake of air before he shouted as loudly as he could, “I’m going to kill you, Danny.”
Into the forest he crept, the only sounds coming from his sneakered footfall. Oddly, not even the riverbanks made a noise—the stillness of night usually brought the faint plunks and splashes of the river’s eroding edges. On that night, there were no sounds. No sights. Only the fog hushing the woods with secrets.
In 1963, two brothers enter the woods on their bikes after a night of trick-or-treating and only one emerges alive. In 1987, the surviving little boy, Chuck Coolidge is now a grown man with two daughters of his own. He's still dealing with the post traumatic stress of losing his six-year-old younger brother Danny. To help out his sick, widowed mother Ruth, he reluctantly returns to his small hometown of Slippery Elm, PA. In addition to the memories of his brother Danny, Chuck is dealing with the emotional scars left by his wife, who abandoned them several years before. As our broken family limps along, we uncover deeper wounds than what first appeared on the surface. Chuck is a drunk; the eldest daughter, 15-year-old Frances, or Frank as she prefers, self-mutilates; and Megan, the youngest at six, goes by the name "Boots" because she wears a pair of her mother's old boots.
Meanwhile, Megan befriends a girl in her class named Bernice Millhouse and Frank in turn befriends a gay, black kid named Ray Jenkins. Frank quickly discovers that a dark cloud of suspicion hangs over their father. Not only is it thought that he did something to his brother, but that he did something to another little six-year-old boy that was killed around that time.
Now it seems that history is repeating itself and once again the town is faced with the mysterious death of another six-year-old. Chuck is arrested and blood is found in his truck. Unsure of what to do with the threat of social services taking them away because now their grandmother is in the hospital, the girls run away.
Is Chuck a child killer? What will become of our two "lost" children if their father is convicted of the murder of Megan's classmate and friend? And can the small town of Slippery Elm learn to accept Ray?
One of the first things that caught my attention about this book is the author's ability to keep time straight. Despite the fact that the author has us time traveling through the decades, she avoids unnecessary anachronisms and actually maintains order through the utilization of "blasts from the past." She mentions that the little boy has a Schwinn Hornet bicycle, a radio flyer wagon, and lets us know about the television shows that Megan and Frank watch, including Scooby Doo.
Contributing to the poignant theme of the book, Symons inputs a lot of foreshadowing. For instance, Frank tells us that she carries "A truth so big I don't know where to keep it...." Also throughout the story Frank comments on the book that she may currently be reading. It would seem that each book she reads has an underlying theme that points the way to a horrible truth, that she may not exactly be ready to accept, about her own life. She reads such books as Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger.
I give Lies in Bone by Natalie Symons 5 out of 5 stars for providing her readers with a realistic side of life that while we may not want to acknowledge it, we can't deny it exists. Warning, this book is for young adults and older due to explicit language and scenes featuring young children.
After reading Lies in Bone by Natalie Symons, one thought kept resonating with me: Truth is relative.