Belated RIP for Jonny Bones

Wrote a lot about Jonny Bones (Jon Aaron) while he was alive, then missed marking his passing, a few weeks ago (Aug. 21). My last one-on-one interactions with him were July 2026, when we swapped a few messages about Stephen King's The Tommyknockers, which I'd read the first third of and loved. Jonny was the biggest King fan I knew, even visiting his old stomping grounds in Maine as a bucket-list travel destination after he found out he was sick. He remarked, in part: 

It's a very strange book. King wrote it while wildly high and it shows. If you cut about 200 pages or so I think there's a really good story in there, but it gets very messy and bogged down in the middle for sure. He's trying to do his big expansive cast/town thing, but he keeps getting sidetracked distracted. Still, when it's good, it's really good.

I replied that the first third was amazing, I thought -- 200 pages of development of just two characters, which I always thought was King's strong suit, character development, and he replied that that was the focused part: 

But wait till you get to the hologram clocktower and superpower egg cartons and flying coke machine. It's a ride for sure. 

Shortly thereafter I got thrown from the book, when I got to the middle part he'd referenced, where after 200 said pages of character development, King completely walks away from the characters he'd invested so much in and proceeds to tell the story of everyone else in the town, a vignette at the time. "Aha, I see what Jonny means".

Maybe I should go back and finish it now! 

But that was our last private exchange, not our last actual one; a bit later on, he popped up in the comments on a Facebook post, back in August, when I listed some reactions to recent horror films I'd seen. I liked Backrooms most of all, but ranked Disclosure Day about Obsession, and while he agreed that Backrooms was special, he argued that I was wildly mistaken about the others -- he thought Spielberg had lost it and that Obsession was the far better film. This was just a couple of weeks before he passed -- which I kind of love, that he was talking horror and SF movies with friends until the end. 

Fittingly, there's a PWYC movie memorial at the Rickshaw on Thursday, with films at 7 and 9pm (also an update to his GoFundMe). Don't know what movies! I was at the final Hollywood Horrorshow back in June 2025 (they played the DePalma Carrie), but the movie I'll remember him for re-introducing me to was a bit after that, when they screened The Monster Squad at the Rickshaw after a benefit show; Jon told me it had been his favourite movie since he was a kid. I'd forgotten how delightful it was! 

RIP, Jonny, thanks for your service to your community...!