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A frustrated geologist studying global warming becomes obsessed with eating rocks after embarking on his first same-sex relationship in Europe. Back home, his young sister is a high-school girl who suddenly starts to ooze honey through her pores, an affliction that attracts hordes of bees as well as her male classmates but ultimately turns her into a social pariah. Meanwhile, their obsessive Pentecostal mother repeatedly calls on the Holy Spirit to rid her family of demons. The siblings are reunited on a ship bound for Europe where they hope to start a new life, but are unaware that their disguised mother is also on board and plotting to win back their souls, with the help of the Virgin Mary.
Told in a lush baroque prose, this intense, extravagant magic-realist novel combines elements of fairy tales, horror movies, and romances to create a comic, hallucinatory celebration of excess and sensuality.
Barry Webster's first book, The Sound of All Flesh, won the ReLit Award for story collections.
"Webster has written a vast, exuberant and optimistic epic about the ebbs and flows of the lava-like oils that lubricate the world’s engine, emphasizing the transformative power of love." —National Post
"The Lava in My Bones is, quite simply, a fabulous book ... “Magical,” “compelling,” “electric,” complex, troubling, and contradictory, The Lava in My Bones is a book that I will read repeatedly throughout my life, illuminating crap times and hard knocks with the seismically wild, deeply relevant and earnest irreverence of it all." —Lambda Literary
"A joyous fairytale about familial dysfunction and our connection to Mother Earth. Webster writes halluncinatory prose with zany gusto ... This is an exhuberantly written novel." —Quill and Quire (STARRED REVIEW)
Barry Webster: Barry Webster’s first book, The Sound of All Flesh, won the ReLit Award for best short-story collection in 2005. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, the CBC-Quebec Prize, and the Hugh MacLennan Award. Originally from Toronto, he currently lives in East Montreal.