T.J. Klune is the #1 New York Times and #1 USA Today bestselling, Lambda Literary Award-winning author of The House in the Cerulean Sea, Under the Whispering Door, In the Lives of Puppets, the Green Creek Series for adults, the Extraordinaries Series for teens, and more. Being queer himself, Klune believes it's important—now more than ever—to have accurate, positive queer representation in stories. His novel, The Bones Beneath My Skin, has recently been republished and he recently talked about it with Daryl Maxwell for the LAPL Blog.
What was your inspiration for The Bones Beneath My Skin?
Originally, I had an idea in 2015 to do a story about a group of teenage boys needing to come together to protect a "special" girl who moved to their town. Sound familiar? That’s because Stranger Things came out in 2016. That happens every now and then.
So I set the idea aside for a bit, letting it cook. And then I came across a blast from the past that I hadn’t thought of in decades: Marshall Applewhite and Heaven’s Gate.
In the mid-nineties, a comet called Hale-Bopp passed by the Earth. Applewhite—a cult leader—believed there was an alien craft in the tail of the comet. He believed that he and his followers would ascend to the craft and become something… more. Instead, they died by mass suicide.
Part of being an author is asking yourself, "What if?" There are dozens of hours of Applewhite’s videos online where he explains his beliefs and how entrenched he was in his ideologies. The idea that a single person could subvert the will of others is fascinating. From there, I began to build the story around the time period. Fun fact: the Heaven’s Gate website is still online, and it looks exactly like it did in the 90s.
Are Artemis, Alex, Nate, Randy, or any of the other characters in the novel inspired by or based on specific individuals?
Oh, absolutely. For instance, the character of Oren is my version of Applewhite, with a bit of Jim Jones and David Koresh thrown in for good measure. I wanted to create someone who—while they may be a villain of sorts—still has valid and powerful reasons for doing what he does. The best kind of "villains" are the ones who are believable, ones who you might find yourself agreeing with in part. Throw in being the leader of a cult, and you need them to be charismatic.
Art, Nate, and Alex aren’t based upon anyone in particular. Though, I think it’s interesting to point out that I wrote Bones, followed by The House in the Cerulean Sea. To me, Art is a precursor to who the children on the island would become. I don’t know that I could have written the island kids as well as I did if I hadn’t first spent time with Artemis. I often wonder what it would be like if Artemis met, say, Lucy. What would that look like? Undoubtedly, it’d send Linus into a tizzy, causing him to mutter, "Oh dear."
How did the novel evolve and change as you wrote and revised it? Are there any characters, scenes, or stories that were lost in the process that you wish had made it to the published version?
Luckily for me, most of what I wanted to keep in the story was kept in the story. Certain things did change—obviously, editing is there to make the book as good as it can be. For example, my editor suggested adding a couple of scenes involving Nate’s brother. Their conversations are short, but they add a necessary depth to Nate’s character and to that of his brother, even though his page time is limited.
Something I pushed to keep: Nate has a friend of sorts, a former co-worker, who is trying to help him. And she does, a couple of times. However, they never see each other again. It was suggested by an editor that Nate reach back out to this character or do something else to let her know what happened. I pushed back on that, because some questions don’t have and/or get answers. To me, the mystery of what happened to Nate over the course of the book isn’t something she was privy to, and I liked the idea of her not quite knowing what happened to Nate.
In your Author’s Note, you describe how you self-published The Bones Beneath My Skin in 2018. Can you tell us a bit about that experience and the journey of re-publishing it with Tor in 2025? Did you make any changes/revisions to the text for the new edition?
The book was intended to go with my previous publisher, a small indie press I’d been with since my first book. However, something odd happened. My publisher called this book "weird, even for TJ." When I was a kid, that word "weird" was used as a pejorative to describe me by my parents, by teachers, by classmates. I was the weird kid. Hearing that as an adult made me have an almost PTSD-like flashback about all the times I’d been bullied with that word. It didn’t sit right with me.
So, I pulled the book from the publisher and decided I was going to self-publish. The timing was odd: it was shortly after that I found out this publisher had been embezzling monies from their authors, cover artists, and editors. So not only did I self-publish Bones, I pulled every book I’d written with this publisher (20+) and self-published all of them at the same time as Bones came out.
I think it got lost in the shuffle of all the publishing drama, so when Tor came calling a few years later and wanted to republish some of my older works, I immediately thought of Bones. They accepted it and published it earlier this year, where it landed on the NYT Bestseller list. A long, complicated journey that ended up working out okay in the end.
And there were very minimal changes to the manuscript, most of it just cleaning up the book and fixing minor mistakes. The story itself did not change from the self-published version to the Tor version.
Do you have a favorite alien/first contact novel, television series, or motion picture?
Oh man, I have SO many of them! Growing up in the 80s and 90s, I was surrounded by things like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Fire in the Sky, Escape to Witch Mountain. But my favorite thing in the world at that time was a show called X-Files.
I adored everything about the X-Files. First, Fox Mulder made me gay. Then Dana Scully made me question that. Then there were monsters and aliens and conspiracy theories, and it lit up my brain like nothing else had before. I was enchanted by that show, especially when I was told I wasn’t allowed to watch it because it was too "dark."
This meant I would sneak-watch it whenever I could or would watch it when I spent the night at a friend’s house. Less should be said about the later seasons of the show, but man, there was nothing like seeing Scully and Mulder finding the weirdest things in the world, and only have it be a Tuesday for them.
A least favorite? (I realize that you may not want to address this one, and if that is the case, please don't. But I also realize it might be so bad that it could be fun to answer.)?
Look, I love horror movies. I love bad horror movies, such as Zombeavers and Velocipastor (which is about a pastor who can turn into a velociraptor. It’s amazing!). So, I think I’m probably not the best person to decide what is "good" or "bad." All that being said: the sequel to Independence Day was a travesty of a film that brought forth one of the worst sins an action movie can make: it was freaking boring. You literally blew up the White House in the first movie and then…made this sequel?
Come On!
Do you believe in life on other planets? Do you think we have been visited by extraterrestrials? Have you ever had an encounter or experience with something you think could have been extraterrestrial in origin?
Oh, absolutely, I believe. It was Carl Sagan who said (paraphrasing here) that it would be hubris to think we are the only planet in the universe that could support life. But what kind of life could that be? If we found fish under the frozen waters of Jupiter’s moons, that would be considered alien. Hell, even if we found microbes, that could be considered extraterrestrial.
It’s when you get into the idea of space travel that it gets to be much harder. As we’re all aware, the universe is enormous, and we have no real idea of how far it goes. If there is something out there, chances are they’re too far away for us to ever know they existed.
However, say that the technology was there, and we had been visited. I highly doubt that an advanced species capable of space travel would come solely to conquer Earth and enslave humanity. I choose to believe that if beings had the power to travel to us, they wouldn’t do so to cause harm but rather to learn about us. I really don’t buy the idea of planetary annihilation at the hands of aliens. But hey, I could be wrong, and a bunch of pissed-off little green men are coming to blow up my house.
Do you share a love of bacon with Art? Crispy or chewy?
Crispy as all hell. In fact, if it’s burnt, that’s going to be a good time had by all.
What’s currently on your nightstand?
Two half-empty water bottles (ADHD for the win!), three chapsticks, and a stack of books that I promise I’m going to read at some point, but will mostly likely by new books and set them on top of the old ones.
What is the last piece of art (music, movies, TV, more traditional art forms) that you've experienced or that has impacted you?
You know what? Speaking of alien movies. I saw a film last year that has really stuck with me, so much so that I’ve watched it a couple of times since. No One Will Save You is a marvel of an alien movie. It has no dialogue, and stars Kaitlyn Dever as she tries to survive an alien encounter at her rural farmhouse. It did things with aliens that I’d never seen before, and I was blown away by how having no dialogue made it that much stronger. One of the best horror films of the last ten years.
What are you working on now?
A couple of things that I can’t talk about quite yet. But, I’ll say this: it will make people laugh, cry, and probably curse my name a time or ten. So, the usual.
