Bones & All is a 2015 coming-of-age romantic horror novel written by Camille De Angelis.
The story centers on Maren Yearly, who is abandoned by her mother due to her cannibalistic urges. Looking after the father she never knew, Maren meets Lee, an intense and disenfranchised drifter. Learning to survive on the fringes of society, both Maren and Lee come to a final stand to prove if their love will overcome their otherness.
A film adaptation directed by Luca Guadagnino was released in 2022.
Bones & All includes examples of:
- Ambiguously Bi: It's left unknown whether Lee is bisexual or if he seduced the man solely as prey for him and Maren.
- Anti-Hero: Our protagonists are technically two Serial Killers, though they're treated sympathetically, and their hunger is not their fault.
- Asshole Victim: Deconstructed in the case of the carnival worker Lee seduces, kills and eats with Maren. He's shown to be a bit of a smug jackass, denying a group of kids a fairly won prize because of a flimsy technicality, and he seems like a bit of a dick otherwise. However, he was still a person with loved ones, as the two leads discover when they make to steal his car, which shakes Maren up quite a bit. Someone can be a bit of a jerk and still not deserve to be killed and eaten.
- Author Tract: Camille De Angelis is vegan and has said one of the points of the book is to make people think of the ramifications of eating meat.
- Autocannibalism: Maren's father in the book eats one of his hands.
- Creepy Souvenir: Sully keeps a braid made from the hair of people he's eaten.
- Death Seeker: Travis the orderly asks Maren to eat him because he is miserable.
- Dirty Old Man: Sully is... infatuated with Maren, to an uncomfortable degree. His motives are not sexual, however.
- Doorstep Baby: Maren finds out that her mother was one of these.
- Eaten Alive: How Maren and Lee eat their victims. Sully only eats corpses but he's willing to kill first.
- Foreshadowing: Lee and Maren break into a slaughterhouse where he used to work to steal some money, and Maren asks Lee if he ever thought about the cows having families. Later, Lee kills a man who turns out to have a family.
- Genre-Busting: The story is a fusion of many genres. It is a coming of age story, a horror story on cannibalism, a romance, and a road trip story.
- Horror Hunger: Maren is, naturally, somewhat disturbed by her cannibal urges at times.
- I'm a Humanitarian: Maren, Lee and Sully are cannibals, or "eaters."
- In the Blood: The cannibal urges Maren and Lee have are hereditary, as each had a parent with this as well.
- The Nose Knows: Eaters can smell each other, sometimes from hundreds of yards away. Sully says that he can smell when ordinary people are dying.
- Offing the Offspring: Sully wants to eat his son. When that possibility eludes him, he sets his sights on his granddaughter Maren.
- Parental Abandonment: Maren is abandoned by her mother, while her father left long ago.
- Recycled In Space: Badlands with cannibalism.
- Scenery Porn: The American heartland is shown in lush detail.
- Tearful Smile: Lee tries to laugh while crying after revealing that the reason why his ex-girlfriend Rachel went insane was because she witnessed Lee eating one of his mother's abusive boyfriends.
- Third-Person Person: Sully speaks like this, referring to himself in the third person.
- Wall Slump: When Lee is fatally stabbed by Sully, he slides down the wall, leaving a trail of blood in it.
