California Bones by Greg van Eekhout, reviewed by Alec Austin

New York: Tor Books, 2014; $24.99 hc; 304 pages

Greg van Eekhout’s California Bones is simultaneously exhilarating and frustrating—exhilarating because of its rapid pacing, gruesome and well-developed magic system, and variety of perspectives on an ambitious heist targeting a magically enhanced Southern California police state; frustrating because for all its enthusiasm, when you pause to examine the underpinnings of its setting, the various pieces of the world don’t add up. It is still a very good book, and one expects many readers won’t notice its missteps. But whenever van Eekhout’s sleight of hand faltered, and the text drew attention to specifics of its alternate history that make no sense, I found myself ejected from the carefully cultivated immersion of California Bones’s heist plot and left contemplating why the B-29 would be developed absent America’s involvement in World War II, how the second Sino-Japanese War would have played out without American access to the Pacific via California, and other questions that the author surely didn’t mean to invite.

At its core, California Bones is about Daniel Blackland, the son of a sorcerer in the Kingdom of Southern California. In Daniel’s world, consuming the bones (and flesh, if available) of a magical or magic-infused creature confers some of the creature’s abilities on the devourer—and while the powers gained thereby are usually temporary, there are ways to make the transfer permanent.

When Daniel’s father is killed during a purge and then eaten by the Hierarch—the ruler of Southern California, who regularly refreshes his power by feasting on his servants—Daniel escapes into the streets and canals of Los Angeles, where Otis (a Fagin figure and one of his father’s allies) raises him to a life of magically assisted crime. For Daniel is the product of his father’s magical experiments, and any magic he consumes becomes a permanent addition to his arsenal. This makes him an especially capable thief—and an extremely tempting prize for the Hierarch and his inner circle, who would like nothing more than to crack Daniel’s bones and suck out the magic they contain.

California Bones wisely glosses over the interval between the death of Daniel’s father and Otis approaching Daniel with the job of a lifetime: breaking into the Ossuary, the Hierarch’s personal treasure trove of bones and magic. Once Daniel is persuaded to take the job, he must recruit the members of his team, who include their inside woman; a shape-shifter; his old flame; and a man for whom death is just an inconvenience. Then he has to acquire the magical supplies they need for the job. Only once everything is in place can the heist begin in earnest.

As Daniel puts the pieces of his operation together, the reader is introduced to the bureaucracy supporting the Hierarch’s rule via Gabriel Argent, the Hierarch’s grand-nephew and a public servant in the Ministry of Osteomancy, who is pulled into the hunt for Daniel. Gabriel is one of the most intriguing characters in the novel, as he is both personally invested in the Hierarch’s rule and intimately aware of its least palatable aspects. It would have been easy to make Gabriel into a cartoon villain, but instead van Eekhout depicts him as humane as well as politically astute, and much of the political dimension of the novel is filtered through Gabriel’s attempts to do the right thing for his city and country.

The bulk of California Bones consists of the team’s raid on the Ossuary and the aftermath thereof, in which fault lines among Southern California’s magical elite (including historical figures such as Walt Disney and William Mulholland as well as fictional characters like Fenmont Szu) threaten to tear Los Angeles apart. Twists, turns, and betrayals abound, and in terms of plot and structure, California Bones is rock-solid with new elaborations on its magic emerging every chapter. Its characterization is less deft with most of Daniel’s team and associates being drawn in broad strokes, but given the momentum with which the plot barrels forward, psychological nuance is clearly not the novel’s raison d’etre.

The two places California Bones falters are in its climax and its world building, as noted. The final duel between Daniel and the Hierarch starts off firmly grounded in the magic system elaborated through the rest of the book, but in its final exchanges, both combatants deploy abilities that seem to come out of left field—a step backwards for a magic system so coherent that one could anticipate the consequences of actions before they showed up on the page.

The world-building issues running through the novel are both more subtle and more pervasive. The alternate Southern California the book occupies is a phantasmagoric wonderland with canals in place of interstate highways, William Mulholland building magical desalination plants to supply Los Angeles with water, a cold war with Northern California, and the La Brea tar pits having been thoroughly mined for mammoth bones.

All of this would have been fine if the book didn’t give readers just enough specifics to poke holes in its history and ask inconvenient questions. These range from mildly irritating shout-outs to real LA landmarks (Tito’s Tacos and Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles being located in the same places as the real world; the Hierarch’s secret lair being hidden in the Hollywood landmark The Magic Castle), to throw-away lines that prompt questions better not asked (How can there be a mural of the Hierarch blowing American B-29s out of the sky when his world’s history deviated from ours before World War I? Why would the US even develop pressurized bombers if Osteomancy is so effective against high-altitude aircraft?), to questions with more immediate relevance (How has Northern California remained independent if the Hierarch is powerful enough to wipe out entire bomber wings—and presumably Northern California’s armies—by himself?).

Ultimately, California Bones is a very enjoyable and entirely self-contained heist novel with robust and gruesome magic, a pleasingly multiethnic cast of characters, and appropriately diverse magical influences. If it falls down as alternate history, it at least considers the means and consequences of over a century of magical rule and presents answers which are grimly credible. Greg van Eekhout plainly loves both Southern California and heist stories, and that affection and enthusiasm permeate the book. As a stand-alone work, California Bones is solid; as the first volume of a planned trilogy, it promises good things to come. And if a thread of frustration runs through this review, it is only because California Bones so often teeters on the verge of greatness without ever quite achieving it.

Alec Austin lives in Berkeley, California.