Books: Frances Hunt's Body Shop and Boneyard by Chad Darnell (2024)

"Three months after accidentally shutting down the Southeastern cell of a human body harvesting operation, Frances Hunt is living her best life. She’s opened a senior citizen recreational facility, quit smoking and drinking, and found a new reason to live. But that doesn’t last long. When disaster hits the small town of Liberty, Frances finds herself being hunted by old foes, betrayed by those she trusted and blackmailed by the people she loves. Her only way out is to assemble an unlikely team of misfits and shut down the international ‘body shop.’”

There is a lot more going on here in the continuation from Buying the Farm (and I agree, as someone points out late in the book “You couldn’t write this shit. You need, like, a chalkboard and flow charts just to keep up”), as things get more absurd as each page flies by. The characters are really fleshed out, which is the strong point of the tale. As wild and sometimes unbelievable the story gets, Frances and the rest still shine and you feel their pain. 

As noted, a lot of stuff happens in what amounts to just a few days, with the lighting and fire damage done to the Baptist Church being at the center of it all. On hindsight, even in such a small town as Liberty is described, the damage done by the rain storm would’ve gotten both local and national news interested almost instantly. Also, it seems surprising that the death count would’ve peaked some people’s interest long before the events of this book. Liberty is seemly a cousin to Stephen King’s Derry, a town that contains more cruelty than any other place –a town where a lot of horrible things happen and yet the people who are born there, who live and work there seem to exist in the ether of indifference. Liberty contains very religious people, but it’s also clearly a place where blinders are put on the eyes of the people, who only care about their petty and small problems and their secrets.

While Frances Hunt remains a black comedy, it’s not as laugh out loud as the first book, though the book is still pretty funny. As author Darnell noted in the previous book, he tried to sell this idea as a movie or a TV series. And this second book is seemly set up as continuing story over what might be a thirteen episode season. He also sets up more plots for a third tale, which appears to be due sometime in 2025.

In the end, a still enjoyable tale filled with almost real-life characters set against a plot that probably does happen in the real world as well. Which is very disturbing.