Bones of Our Stars, Blood of Our World
Cullen Bunn
Trade Paperback / eBook
ISBN: 978-1668065273
Gallery Books, November 2025, 464 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! This month, we’re going to lock our doors and check the windows for gaps because horrifying eldritch shenanigans are invading the small town of Wilson Island—that’s right, it’s Bones of Our Stars, Blood of Our World by Cullen Bunn!

Before I get into the review of this particular book, I have to offer a warning on the level of gore and psychological tension it contains, because hoooo boy does this one rack up a body count. Please make sure you’re okay with descriptive acts of violence and dealing with the rising dread of existential horror since Bunn does not hold back on either. While things never felt salacious or unnecessary, this one definitely needs a trigger warning.

Okay, now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about Bones of Our Stars, Blood of Our World!

The story takes place in the small island town of Wilson Island, featuring multiple viewpoints from among the island’s many residents (some recurring, some one-offs), and starts with the grisly late-night murder of a husband and wife by the “No-Face Man,” who’s harvesting organs for an unknown purpose. From there, an investigation ensues, drawing in more and more members of the town, and revealing deeper and deeper mysteries that eventually culminate in an epic conclusion that I’m not even going to hint at spoiling. Along the way, we get to know the inhabitants of Wilson Island in all their many complexities, both good and ill, as well as the town itself in a way that turns it into a sort of meta character, tying the entire book together.

The first thing that really struck me upon finishing Bones of Our Stars, Blood of Our World was how many layers Bunn weaves into the story, and how neatly they contribute to the constant ratcheting of tension that never stops building. Every chapter is like the ticking of a bomb’s clock, bringing you closer and closer to an unwanted outcome. Yet there’s always a lingering thread of hope underlying the ominous press of the present, the feeling that you just might make it out of the explosion. Every character in this story has something that made me want them to survive, an essential humanity that I could identify with, yet so many of them are also broken, flawed, shattered almost to the point of unrepair, and it’s to Bunn’s credit that a lot of character deaths made me feel conflicting emotions because they were awful people, yet I still wanted them to make it.

The second aspect of this book that I want to share with you, and it’s an important one, is that it is an entirely unapologetic look at the life of a young woman with dreams trapped in a shitty small town. This motif infuses the entire story in ways that aren’t immediately obvious on a first read yet linger long after you finish the final page. The story of Wilson Island is the story of people trying to escape the quicksand trap they’ve found their lives becoming, and I constantly felt like I was reading a higher-octane Stephen King or Ray Bradbury tale. Wilson Island, much like Derry in It, or Green Town in Something Wicked This Way Comes, is a grasping monster with a life all its own, yet the underlying horror isn’t eldritch or unfathomable; it is simply the withering eternity of being trapped in a world too small for someone’s dreams, and Bunn conveys this sentiment magnificently. If we’re not free to chase our dreams, then what freedom do we truly have?

Above all else, I think what spoke to me the most about Bones of Our Stars, Blood of Our World is that, while it is a pulpy horror novel that George A. Romero would have loved to bring to the big screen, it contains that quintessential essence of Americana horribilis that infuses so much of this country’s most memorable works; the substitution of ghouls and zombies and murderous clowns that stand in for the racism, bigotry, and petty small-mindedness that still haunt us to this very day. Horror, at its very best, turns the mirror back on the audience and makes us grapple with the very real terrors that stalk our living world—terrors that wrap their vile views and rotting ideas in the faces and flesh of our friends and neighbors. They’re presented on the page and screen as outlandish creations, but ones that we recognize in our bones and blood as wrong, because they destroy our own essential humanity to make room for their small-minded hate and demand that we sacrifice each other in order to feed some monstrous unseen beast down below.

Bones of Our Stars, Blood of Our World is grotesque, chilling, and frequently made me want to throw something at the wall, but it is entirely worth your time if you care at all about creating a world that is slightly better than the one we inhabit today. You should read it, and you should think about what drives someone to write something like it.