Meat on the Bone — Brian Stableford

The Postmortal Reservation might not be Heaven exactly, but for Peterkin the piano player it's good enough. His afterlife is unclouded by the anxieties of mortality. After all, he's a skeleton. He only has to look in the mirror to see what squishy folk take for the image of death itself. True to their permanent smile, skellies are a happy-go-lucky species. There is nothing they love more than dancing, and cutting a rug with Melissa at the Palais de Danse Macabre, Peterkin thinks he might be at the start of something beautiful. It's true he's not in the best of neighbourhoods, but things are looking up, until . . . the incident with the zombies at the train track and the appearance of a suspicious-looking discoloration spreading from the carpal area of his left arm. Soon he has to place himself in the hands, both fleshy and spectral, of experts who might not have his best interests at heart and, humble piano player though he is, play his own part in the fate of the Ghetto itself. Set in a future world where ghosts, vampires, werewolves and zombies are finally recognised as real, Meat on the Bone is a unique excursion into modes of possible human existence beyond our familiar fleshy mortality. Part grinning graveyard caper, part science fiction, part oddball existentialism, this is a novel in which we learn that one man's death is another man's dance hall.