Bone Saw started on a break. I’d been deep inside something else for months, a longer, slower book that asks for a different kind of attention, and stepping away from it for a while left room for a different idea to walk in.
The idea was American gothic, and I wanted it without the South. Not because the South hasn’t earned its place in the genre, it has, several times over. I wanted the dread to travel differently.
An object instead of a region
Most American gothic ties itself to a place. A house, a plantation, a stretch of swamp, somewhere haunted by what happened there and unable to leave it behind. I wanted the horror to move the way an object moves instead. A bone saw goes wherever the surgeon carries it. It has no address. It belongs to whoever is holding it, and to whatever gets done with it next.
The story still has an American origin. A Civil War operating table is about as American a horror as exists. But what carries that horror forward isn’t a haunted region, it’s a tool that outlives every hand that ever picked it up.
What the amputations cost to write
I should say plainly what I haven’t said anywhere else on this site. The amputation scenes were hard to write, and they got harder rather than easier with each pass. Editing a scene means reading it again and again, checking pacing, checking whether a detail is doing its work, and every single time I had to put the manuscript down and walk away for a while afterward.
I don’t know whether that’s just how vividly I see a scene while I’m inside it, or something closer to what those pages are actually asking of a reader. I’ve written dark material before. This was different.
Part of the difference is how little of it is invented. Fiction gets to retreat behind the fact that it made something up. What people actually went through on a Civil War operating table doesn’t offer that retreat. Bone Saw pushes real history toward invention, not the other way around, and I felt that difference every time I sat back down with it. For more on where the documented history ends and the fiction begins, see Were Civil War Surgeons Butchers?