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A review by deehaichess
Skin by Peter Fugazzotto
4.0
Generally novellas aren't my speed, but Skin was a fantastic mashup of my favourite genre in movies, and my favourite genre in reading - monsters vs men in an epic fantasy setting. It was like spending a couple of hours in the cinema of the mind where there was just enough horror, action, and otherworldliness to keep me glued to my seat.
Fugazzotto's writing is nicely paced, easy to read, and evokes exactly the right amount of atmosphere, both in terms of the environment as well as the inherent paranoia and the sense of the unavoidable required for a really good monster slasher film. If he leaves acknowledgement to John Carpenter's The Thing in his Afterword, that's definitely not a point against him. This novella borrows a little of the suspicious claustrophobia in that masterpiece of monster cinema in the jaded, post-traumatic Hemming trapped in a snowed-in keep with a bunch of macho morons and something that clearly hasn't had a decent meal in a while, as much as it borrows a little of the early Nordic tones of something like 13th Warrior.
I think if there were any criticisms to be made, it would be length. As it stands, a novella is just long enough to give you that 90's monster movie vibe: you'll know it when you get there, and again, this isn't exactly a point against it. But a longer story might have taken it all the way to a more comprehensive conclusion which answered the kinds of questions most people would probably want to know. For me personally, that fact that it was a novella prepared me for the likely conclusion well ahead of time.
Fugazzotto's writing is nicely paced, easy to read, and evokes exactly the right amount of atmosphere, both in terms of the environment as well as the inherent paranoia and the sense of the unavoidable required for a really good monster slasher film. If he leaves acknowledgement to John Carpenter's The Thing in his Afterword, that's definitely not a point against him. This novella borrows a little of the suspicious claustrophobia in that masterpiece of monster cinema in the jaded, post-traumatic Hemming trapped in a snowed-in keep with a bunch of macho morons and something that clearly hasn't had a decent meal in a while, as much as it borrows a little of the early Nordic tones of something like 13th Warrior.
I think if there were any criticisms to be made, it would be length. As it stands, a novella is just long enough to give you that 90's monster movie vibe: you'll know it when you get there, and again, this isn't exactly a point against it. But a longer story might have taken it all the way to a more comprehensive conclusion which answered the kinds of questions most people would probably want to know. For me personally, that fact that it was a novella prepared me for the likely conclusion well ahead of time.