The Bone Lantern of Erhai
Release Date: Monday, May 26th, 2025
Pages: 664 pages
In 'The Bone Lantern of Erhai,' memory is a regulated substance, and Ren Xue, an investigator of grief, confronts her past when a contraband Bone Lantern reveals a voice from a lost love, challenging her understanding of identity and mourning.
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The Bone Lantern of Erhai
A speculative literary novel about memory, identity, and the architecture of grief.
Memory has become a controlled substance in a city half-drowned by rising tides and rising silence. Grief is monitored. Mourning must be licensed. Bone Lanterns, ritual vessels that preserve emotional residue, are outlawed as dangerous relics of the past.
Ren Xue works for Echo Division, investigating illegal grief signatures and confiscating Lanterns that still flicker with forbidden breath. She’s trained not to feel, only to catalog. But Ren begins to unravel when a contraband Bone Lantern whispers in the voice of someone she once loved, Jia Mei, who has long disappeared.
Her optic lens glitches. Her own surveillance signature fades from the grid. Bone Lanterns respond to her presence with a heat only the grieving should feel. The voice inside the latest Bone Lantern doesn’t sound like a recording. It sounds like someone alive inside her skull.
As Ren searches for the truth behind Jia’s vanishing, she descends through sump-market forgers, breath-coded Codex rituals, and shrine children who chant lines from an ancient myth that feels eerily familiar. Somewhere between a corpse archive and an echo ceremony, Ren realizes that Jia may not have died. She may have turned herself into a story. A story powerful enough to rewrite Ren from the inside out.
A speculative literary novel about memory, identity, and the architecture of grief.
Memory has become a controlled substance in a city half-drowned by rising tides and rising silence. Grief is monitored. Mourning must be licensed. Bone Lanterns, ritual vessels that preserve emotional residue, are outlawed as dangerous relics of the past.
Ren Xue works for Echo Division, investigating illegal grief signatures and confiscating Lanterns that still flicker with forbidden breath. She’s trained not to feel, only to catalog. But Ren begins to unravel when a contraband Bone Lantern whispers in the voice of someone she once loved, Jia Mei, who has long disappeared.
Her optic lens glitches. Her own surveillance signature fades from the grid. Bone Lanterns respond to her presence with a heat only the grieving should feel. The voice inside the latest Bone Lantern doesn’t sound like a recording. It sounds like someone alive inside her skull.
As Ren searches for the truth behind Jia’s vanishing, she descends through sump-market forgers, breath-coded Codex rituals, and shrine children who chant lines from an ancient myth that feels eerily familiar. Somewhere between a corpse archive and an echo ceremony, Ren realizes that Jia may not have died. She may have turned herself into a story. A story powerful enough to rewrite Ren from the inside out.