Skeleton King

“She’s not old enough to drink, but I also have a stuffed corpse in my basement, so I can’t say I’m a stickler for obeying Mundane laws.”

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REVIEW

Would I read this again? Yes No Maybe

Spice Level Legend How spicy is this book?

Tropes	Trigger Warnings
Forbidden love, Dark (dark dark) romance, Friends to lovers	Necrophilia, Forced Sterilization, Body Mutilation, Rape, Cannibalism, Non-Con, Dub-Con, Kidnapping, Captivity, Forced Surgeries, Physical Abuse, Mental Abuse, Murder, Violence, Children Seeing Sexual Activity, Dead Body Taxidermy, Drinking Blood, Voyeurism, Body Parts Used In Various Scenarios, Sexual Assault, Poisoning

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SUMMARY

Skeleton King is book 8 out of 13 in the series called The Dirty Heroes Collection. They are all stand-alones and all are dark romance re-imagining of popular stories. Skeleton King for example is a re-imagining of A Nightmare Before Christmas. If this is your favorite movie, proceed with caution.

John is a grave robber. He does this for … sexual reasons. Once he’s done with the corpse, then he uses them to sell parts to his neighbors. Some neighbors use skin for things and others use the bones. No piece goes wasted.

(Yes I realize that sounds really fucked up….because it is….anyways, it gets worse, so buckle up)...

Jack lives in a village called Hallows Grove. Hallows Grove is a gated community. They are secluded from the Mundane world so that they can indulge in their perverse ways. In a way, they are safe from us and we are safe from them. 

Sarah Stein is an unfortunate young lady. She was kidnapped as a young girl and is basically being held hostage by Fink. She doesn’t remember her real family, Fink has only told her that he “saved” her. Fink and his “assistant” Ingvar have spent the last ten years taking Sarah apart and then putting her back together again. For example, he cut off a finger and then reattached it. Sarah snuck out of her house and snuck in the back of John’s car on Halloween Eve when he went to go dig up his latest girlfriend. When she gets home, she gets punished, aka raped, by Fink and Ingvar. 

Halloween night is a big deal in their little freakshow of a town. They have Halloween Games where the whole town participates. Hallows Grove has their own mayor, city council, and “police” (dudes who just do what the mayor tells them to do). John is a pretty big deal in town since he has the dead body goods. He goes to the games with his face painted like a skeleton and the town loves to take pictures with him.

He stays for a bit and leaves when he thinks it's acceptable. He wanders into the graveyard and spots Sarah. She begs him to not tell Fink that he saw her. John actually likes Fink. Fink is the one who introduced him to Hallows Grove so he feels like he owes him something. They walk and talk for just a bit until Sarah hears Fink and runs home. She doesn’t beat him home, unfortunately, and he has Ingvar take her to the lab.

Fink tells Sarah that he grew up in Hallows Grove, but wanted to go to college so he moved to the Mundane World. He had a wife and a daughter. His daughter died and he was trying to clone her when he got caught. He lost his wife and career. So he moved back to Hallows Grove. When he saw Sarah, he decided he had a second chance at his daughter. His daughter, whose name was Sarah, loved rag dolls, so he has been trying to make this Sarah (not her real name) into a rag doll that his daughter would love. He decides that she doesn’t smile enough so he makes her smile permanent. The next day, he is “punishing” her again, when John shows up. John just wanted to borrow somethings but now he is witnessing Sarah, with her new incisions on her face, being raped by Fink. Sarah, who has a big ole crush on John, feels even worse than she did before. 

Two weeks later, John is feeling all sorts of confused. Halloween night he accidentally touched Sarah’s hand a few times and now he is wishing his corpses were warm. So he’s been conducting experiments to figure out how to make that happen (good luck dude). He can’t stop thinking about Sarah but one small problem - she’s alive. Alive women scare John. 

Sarah shows up at John’s door. He invites her in, promising he won’t tell Fink. He tells her he hates what Fink puts her through but he can’t really do anything to stop it. Sarah asks John if he will bring her down to his lab, once she dies. John is repulsed. Not because he doesn’t want Sarah, he does, but he doesn’t want her cold. At first, she is hurt, thinking he doesn’t like her all, and then he kisses her. Then, John-I’m-scared-of-living-women Skelver fucks Sarah.

Sarah’s like this is the happiest day of my life. Then as soon as they’re done, Johns like you gotta go and he kicks her out.

He doesn’t want Sarah to realize how fucked up he is and reject him, so he’s going to reject her first. Now that he’s all fucked up from having his first alive woman, he needs to figure out how to make them warm. He gets rid of the corpse he’s been using (for over 2 weeks…god the smell must be horrendous) and goes to get a new one. But even though he wraps it in an electric blanket and uses heat lamps, it's still dead and cold. 

Sarah arrives back home and finds Ogier Bognar is at their house. Fink has given her away to Ogier. Ogier rapes her and tortures her which makes her miss Fink. The next day Ogier brings in another girl and after, he kills her. Then at dinner that night, he asks Sarah how she likes her dinner…does she taste as good as she did earlier? Sarah realizes that she is eating a person and vomits (kind of like what I wanted to do after reading that).

Ogier has these annoying triplets, and they take the remains to John. They tell John they hate their new mommy, that rag doll. John is furious. Why does Ogier have Sarah? John gets a gun and goes to Ogier’s house. When he walks in, Ogier is talking to Fink. John gets real pissed off because Ogier is talking badly about Sarah so he punches him then holds the gun to his head. Sarah was down in the basement, trying to find some clothes for a new little girl Fink has abducted when she hears the commotion. She goes upstairs and John apologizes to her and tells her to please go wait at his house. She asks him to get the little girl before he leaves.

Fink has Ingvar run at John, John drops the gun, and it goes off. John uses his anger towards what they did to Sarah to beat the fuck out of Ingvar. When he finally stops, he notices Fink leaning next to Ogier, who isn’t moving. Fink tells John he will pay for this and John says “Follow me, and I’ll put a bullet in your demented brain”. John goes downstairs and gets the little girl away from the triplets. He gives her instructions to go to his house to wait with Sarah.

John goes back inside the house and the Mayor is there. He is pissed off at John. This little freak show of a town has rules goddamnit and you just can’t break them. John tells him he's in love with Sarah, he didn’t go there with any plan other than to get Sarah. And that little girl was stolen from the Mundane world. Why is Fink’s rights more important than hers? And the Mundanes have gotten way better with science and they will use their resources to find that little girl. The Mayor tells John to wait to take her back home but John doesn’t listen.

When he gets home, Sarah and the little girl, Sandy, are playing with John’s dog, Nothing. John asks Sandy if she can do him a favor. He’ll take her home but she has to promise not to tell anyone about their little town. She promises. He drives her to her town - Hollyville - where it's all done up in Christmas lights (it's the middle of November at this point). 

After dropping Sandy off, John apologizes to Sarah, for what she’s been through that he didn’t stop and what he did to her. He said he just doesn’t want to feel rejected anymore and if Sarah realizes how fucked up he is, she will leave him. She tells him that she sees him for him and she wants him. She tells him she just wants to be wherever he is even if they get kicked out of Hallows Grove.

When they arrive back at John's house, the mayor shows up. He tells them that Ogier is in a coma but Fink was able to stabilize him. Fink is still pissed off at John. Then he asks where the little girl is and gets really mad when he finds out they took her home. The Mayor says getting the little girl back was the only way Fink was going to calm down and now he’ll demand a trial. Sarah asks what a trial is and John tells her it’s where he tells his side of the story, Fink tells his side, and then the town votes on whose side they are on. If John loses, he could lose his place in Hallows Grove, be put in jail, or be killed. 

The next day, Sarah turns the news on and sees a Mundane woman crying asking for her daughter's body back. Sarah asks John if this was one of his and he says yes. He tells Sarah he really didn’t think he was hurting anyone since the bodies were already dead. Sarah and him make a plan to write apology letters and leave them on all the graves. But first, the trial is tonight. 

Fink gives his testimony, John gives his, and then Sarah speaks. The town asks a couple questions of John and then they vote. John ends up getting no jail time, he will serve 1000 hours in community service or pay $5000. The Mayor also agrees with John that there should be no more Mundane kidnapping. Not because he feels bad for the kids but because it can draw unwanted attention to their town. 

Over the next month, Sarah and John live together, decorating their house for Christmas, while John writes apology letters and delivers them to the graves. He is also being choosier over which bodies he steals - going for John and Jane Does if he can. One day in December, Sarah decides to go to Fink’s house to ask him where she came from. He tells her he saw her playing with her brother in her front yard and she looked so much like his daughter, he thought it was her. Her real name is Timara. She asks if her family is still around and he says again that he saved her. He kidnapped her in June and in December her family died in their house from carbon monoxide poisoning. 

When she gets home, the Mayor calls. Says John was found outside the city gates, in his car, unconscious, shot. He goes into surgery with Fink (who is their town doctor I guess). When John went to deliver a note, there was a family member there. The news had been covering how someone had been leaving notes on the empty graves, so this family member has been hanging out, waiting. He shoots John but John manages to drag himself back to his car and drive home. 

On Christmas day, a week and a half after being shot, Fink finally lets John go home. That night, John asks Sarah to marry him, and of course, she says yes.

Three months later - Sarah and John have a big town celebration at their house for Easter. Sarah finds out that Fink has been hooking up with a woman named Madame Emerald, and they’re pregnant. Sarah is heartbroken because when she was younger, Fink removed her uterus so she can’t get pregnant. 

John gets a phone call from the front gates, there’s a Mundane man and child there asking for him. John sneaks out of the house during the party and goes to the gates. The man at the gate is claiming to be John’s father. He asks John to please join them at a diner because he needs to speak with him. John agrees. His dad tells him that he’s dying and that this little girl, Christy, is his daughter and he has no one else to take her. John is shocked, to say the least, and tells his dad that he needs to talk to Sarah before he adopts his half sister. He takes Christy back to his house where Sarah is a little shocked as well. Christy stays the night and Sarah says they have to adopt her, she just knows that Christy is supposed to be with them. John agrees. They will adopt Christy but she will live with their dad until he is no longer able to care for her, then she’ll come to Hallows Grove…..where I’m sure she’ll grow up perfectly normal and not at all fucked up.