What's Bred in the Bone is written as a biography of Francis Cornish. It proceeds chronologically, starting with the familial and cultural background of Francis Cornish and concluding with his death. However, it is a biography with a twist. What the reader is reading is "the record, or the film, or the tape or whatever it must be called" of Francis's life on file with the Angel of Biography. The text of the novel might be looked at as source material for a biography of Cornish, perhaps to be written by Simon Darcourt. Short dialogues between two spirits are interspersed throughout the narrative, always relating what has just been presented to the final product, i.e., Francis Cornish's character. These spirits, whether they be recording angels or Greek daimons, represent things that are part of the human experience. According to Darcourt, the Recording Angel "exists as a metaphor...