Bones & All

Bones & All is a novel by the American writer Camille DeAngelis, first published in 2015. It was adapted into a feature film in 2022.

The book follows Maren Yearly, who has been moving from town to town with her mother for as long as she can remember and who is left alone the day after her sixteenth birthday. Maren eats people, which she has been doing since she was a small child and cannot explain or stop, and the novel is about the practical arrangements that follow: a bus ticket, cheap rooms, jobs that will take someone with no history, and the difficulty of being near anybody. As she travels she meets others who live the same way, including an older man who claims to know something about her, and the question of whether her condition has a cause becomes the thread the journey follows. DeAngelis wrote the book as a coming-of-age story in the horror register, and its acknowledgement section names the writers and researchers she drew on.

The novel is set in the rural United States in the late 1990s, and its use of a cannibal protagonist to ask about appetite and belonging is what distinguishes it from the monster stories it borrows its shape from.