skygiants

Heh, I have approximately zero intention of reading any Sarah Monette books unless someone makes a really convincing argument

The Kyle Murchison Booth stories are great. The protagonist is an archivist at the Samuel Mather Parrington Museum in a well-portrayed and almost certainly fictitious American city in the early twentieth century. He is intelligent, queer, socially anxious, and extraordinarily sensitive to supernatural phenomena; the last of these traits is the one that really gives him tsuris, although the others play their parts. His life is in dialogue with Lovecraft and M.R. James, but the stories are not pastiches; they have their own voice and their own distinctly contemporary concerns. The largest number have been collected in The Bone Key (2007, reprinted with a new introduction 2011) and the chapbook Unnatural Creatures (2011); there are also some uncollected stories scattered around the internet. rushthatspeaks has written about both books. They are the reason I keep reading Sarah Monette. I bounced entirely off the Doctrine of Labyrinths like you wouldn't believe.