★★★★☆ Humans can be scary, too

Crowbones

Anne Bishop

Crowbones is the third novel in Anne Bishop's World of the Others and eighth in The Others series, and it is, sadly, the last. Since it was published in 2022 and we've now entered 2025, it seems likely that this is the very end of The Others.

We return to Lake Silence for Crowbones, with old favorites Vicki, Grimshaw, Julian, and of course Aggie Crowe and her fellow Crowguard along with the Sanguinetti across the lake from Sproing at Silence Lodge. It all starts one Halloween night, except that since this is Namid, Halloween is called "Trickster Night," but yeah, it is totally Halloween. Vicki tells Aggie Crowe and her other Crowguard employees about it, and they just love the idea, so Vicki finds herself in charge of a big party at the Jumble.

And, well, stuff goes wrong. Like, the kind of wrong that leaves dismembered human bodies littering the grounds.

It has been a constant throughout the previous The Others novels that humans were rarely truly dangerous to terra indigene. They might for a brief time get the jump on a community, as when in Marked in Flesh the Humans First and Last movement managed to surprise and slaughter a pack of Wolfguard with big guns, only to be wiped off the map themselves by more powerful terra indigene. But the main impression one got from the first seven novels is that humans are entirely outmatched by terra indigene. Only very stupid humans attack terra indigene, and they are only briefly an inconvenience.

In Crowbones, in contrast, we meet some humans who are truly dangerous to terra indigene. It makes for a better novel, I think, because we feel that there's real fight. Crowbones might even be the best novel in the series.

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