"The Bone Cutters" is a slow-burn horror story where "Girl, Interrupted" meets Joe Hill.
The Bone Cutters by Renee DeCamillis
In "The Bone Cutters" by Renee DeCamillis, we don't know why the protagonist, Dory, wakes up in the padded room of a psychiatric hospital with no recollection of how she wound up there. However, that's the least of our concerns as a reader when we discover, along with Dory, that she's been placed into the wrong counseling group with a new breed of psychiatric patient she's never encountered before. Mistakenly assuming these strange people are mere "cutters" since they all seem to carry telltale scars from their flesh being sliced open, we discover that these patients are actually known as "Dusters"... and they get high by cutting into humans and chiseling pieces of their bones to snort in dust form like cocaine. Being new blood and labeled as a "Freshie" - Dory soon finds herself a prime target for these cannibalistic junkies and tries to move past her barriers as a psych patient and get someone, anyone, to believe her. But who in their right mind would believe a psych ward patient who has violent outbursts and scratches her own head to the point of bleeding without her even realizing it? The Bone Cutters is one woman's dark and surreal experience with a madness that is not necessarily her own.
While "The Bone Cutters" is a novella, Renee DeCamillis moves at a comfortable speed, setting up new horrors around every sterilized corner, each sharper and more tangible than the last. The setting and what's beyond the psychiatric hospital's walls are as inconsequential as the reasons for Dory's presence. The focus is instead wholly on the unraveling horror committed by the Dusters, who are always waiting to strike from the shadows at any opportunity. Their hunger for the bone dust is all-consuming, and heightens their abilities to above human capability, rendering them into cryptic-like pack animals in human form which alerts the survival instinct part of our brains as we read, causing us to root for Dory to find a way to escape these junkies and somehow return to a normal life.
Dory is a sympathetic character, and though we inhabit her thoughts as a reader, they are not the thoughts of an insane woman. Indeed, we find more than enough humanity inside her, as well as humor, wit, and pluck to paint a portrait of Dory as a likable person trapped in the most extreme and degrading human experience to exist in civilized society. Mental health is a topical concern in our everyday life, and while "The Bone Cutters" makes no outright commentary on the state of the human condition, Dory should be seen as a victim whose greatest enemy isn't the cannibalistic junkies she's trapped inside the psychiatric hospital with, but rather the everyday people in her life that allowed her to be "Blue-Papered" and involuntarily committed where society will forget about her, and countless others like her.
"The Bone Cutters" will appeal to you if you liked "Girl, Interrupted" by Susanna Kaysen or short stories like "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, or even if you enjoy thriller-horror tales in the style of Joe Hill or Stephen King. Renee DeCamillis has crafted a story which will have your pulse pounding like a chisel's being held to your flesh, and also have you as enthralled as any Duster.