Cold Skin - Softcover

Albert Sanchez Pinol

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841958832 ISBN 13: 9781841958835

Publisher: Canongate U.S., 2007

Synopsis

Shortly after World War I, a troubled man accepts a solitary assignment as a weather official” on a tiny, remote island on the edges of the Antarctic. When he arrives, the predecessor he is meant to replace is missing and a deeply disturbed stranger is barricaded in a heavily fortified lighthouse. At first adversaries, the two find that their tenuous partnership may be the only way they survive the unspeakably horrific reptilian creatures that ravage the island at night, attacking the lighthouse in their organized effort to find warm-blooded food. Armed with a battery of ammunition and explosives, the weather official and his new ally must confront their increasingly murderous mentality, and, when the possibility of a kind of truce presents itself, decide what kind of island they will inhabit. Equal parts Stephen King, a phantasmagorical Robinson Crusoe, and Lord of the Flies, Cold Skin is literary horror that deals with the basist forms of human behavior imaginable, while exploring why we so vehemently fear the Other.

About this title

About the Author

Albert Sánchez-Pinol is an anthropologist. Cold Skin has been translated into fifteen languages.

From Publishers Weekly

In this grim, H.G. Wellsian fable, an unnamed European of unspecified nationality is hired to spend an unspecified mid-20th-century year logging wind conditions on a tiny Antarctic island. Anticipating solitude, the bookish young man soon discovers that he has a neighbor—the pathologically reclusive Gruner—and that each night, the island is overrun by humanoid killer amphibians. He and brutish Gruner—who has tamed a "toad" of his own—join forces, killing monsters by night and fornicating with Gruner's pet by day. Inspired by the creature's ability to laugh and cry—to say nothing of her perky breasts, knack for housework and wordless submissiveness—the narrator begins to think of the cold-blooded creatures as human. When he tries to befriend them and their children, his efforts pacify the humanoids, but not Gruner; the hopeful idyll ends when the older man launches a last suicidal effort to exterminate the "monsters." Gruner's death plunges our hero into a rut of battle, drunkenness and bestiality so complete that when his replacement arrives, he has become as feral as Gruner was before him. Sentence by elegant sentence, Pińol's first novel offers a tightly crafted allegory of human brutality both fascinating and repellent. (Nov.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Canongate U.S.
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1841958832
• ISBN 13: 9781841958835
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 240