TJ Klune's “The Bones Beneath My Skin ”Reads Like a Queer Action Movie: ‘We Can Survive Anything’ (Exclusive)

Dedicated readers of TJ Klune, author of bestsellers like 2020's The House on the Cerulean Sea and 2021's Under the Whispering Door, may recognize the title of his latest book, The Bones Beneath My Skin.

The author, 42, originally self-published the speculative thriller in 2018 before it found its home with Tor Books, who published a new edition of the novel on Feb 4. But the author tells PEOPLE that none of that would have been possible had he not listened to his gut, and pulled the book from a different publisher after an unfortunate mishap.

“I received a message that was not meant for me, that was meant for my editor at this publisher when I submitted this book,” Klune tells PEOPLE. “[The message] said, ‘Here's TJ Klune's new book. Prepare yourself, it's a weird one even for him.”

“I remember getting that email and having this almost-PTSD flashback to when I was a kid. That word 'weird' was used as a pejorative [to describe] me by everyone: by my parents, family, friends, teachers. And that felt like a punch in the gut, especially when you're a kid,” he says. “Now that I've gotten older, stuff like that doesn't bother me anymore. My weirdness is part of me.”

That self-proclaimed “weirdness” has led to the success of Klune's books over the years, beginning with his 2011 debut Bear, Otter and the Kid. His novels have featured fan-favorite characters ranging from a lovesick vacuum cleaner to a talking, shapeshifting blob.

Bones holds some similarities too. The novel follows Nate Cartwright, a journalist who, in the wake of a scandal of his own doing, leaves Washington, D.C. for his dead parents’ cabin in Roseland, Ore. When he arrives, he’s greeted by a man named Alex and a strange girl who calls herself Artemis Darth Vader. The two are on the run from a mysterious place called The Mountain — and soon Nate finds himself tagging along on a raucous road trip.

Klune says he originally set out to write a book about a group of boys who must protect a girl with mysterious powers, in the vein of Stephen King’s It and Robert McCammon’s Boy's Life. When Netflix dropped the similar-themed sci-fi series Stranger Things in 2016, however, the author had to pivot.

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“When you think of action movies, you think of Die Hard or anything starring Jason Statham. But you never see queer people getting to be in an action movie. You never see queer people running away from black helicopters or explosions or evil cults,” he explains. “In my head, it started out with this idea of a queer action movie set in the nineties, but it would be through the lens of TJ Klune.”

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The author was also intentional about setting the novel in 1995, in what he deems "the real world." Klune, who was fascinated by the Heaven’s Gate religious cult and the Waco tragedy, incorporated a side plot inspired by those news stories, but purposefully set Bones after the height of the AIDS epidemic. Nate, who is gay, is ostracized by his family because of his sexuality.

“For some people, this will be the first time they've seen me write about homophobia in books,” he says. “I tend not to put homophobia in my books because homophobia, to be quite frank, is boring …But in this book, in the nineties, it would've felt inauthentic had I not.”

As an avid reader growing up in Oregon at that time, Klune always knew that he wanted to tell stories centering queer characters, particularly after he first came out to his librarian when he was 16. The librarian, Klune recalls, gave him the novel The Front Runner by Patricia Nell Warren — the first book featuring gay characters that he'd seen. But he wasn't satisfied by its tragic ending.

“Queer characters, they don't need to just be there for suffering. They don't just need to be there to be the very valuable lesson for their straight counterparts,” Klune says. “Queer people can be villains. Queer people can be the heroes of the books. Queer people can go on adventures in stories and find their true selves and their happy endings, just like everybody else gets to have.”

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Found family is also central to many of Klune's novels, from the Cerulean Sea series to his popular Green Creek books. Bones is no exception as Nate, Alex and Artemis form an unbreakable — not to mention otherworldly — bond with one another. For the author, however, the topic is much more than a marketing trope.

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“Found family came from queer people,” Klune says. “It came from a very real place for people, myself included, who did not have the love and support growing up that kids should have. We had to go out and make our own families.”

“Regardless of how futuristic the year 2025 sounds, there are so many kids, many young people all over this country and all over the world, who can't be their true authentic selves because of the home that they live in. And if I can give them a little bit of hope in what I write, then that's what I do.”

Many of those readers, young and new, came to Klune through his Cerulean Sea series, centered on an orphanage for children with magical abilities. The books, which include the 2024 sequel Somewhere Beyond the Sea, grew popular on TikTok for their “cozy fantasy” vibes, though Klune says his latest release marks a new step forward in his work.

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“I want this book to help me prove to people that I am not just about one thing, that I'm not just a cozy fiction writer, that I want to do so many different things,” Klune says. “This book being re-released now is important because this is what it's going to look like for me going forward … I'm very lucky to be where I'm at because now I'm getting the opportunity to show what else I can do.”

Despite a departure in genre, The Bones Beneath My Skin still carries one of Klune’s most beloved messages: the importance of leaning on one another in tough times.

“It goes to show just how far a group of people can go when they work together — to protect each other, to love each other, and to stand up against the forces of evil, of wrong, of people who are trying to harm us,” he says. “I think this book, to me, is a rallying cry that no matter what comes after us, no matter who tries to bring us down, as long as we sit together, we can survive anything.”

The Bones Beneath My Skin is out now, wherever books are sold.

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