The Skin Team

by Jordaan Mason

There's been a fire at the Power Company Building. A vomit of lightbulbs. A compass recovered from the stomach, pointing to True North. Teams of boys in the woods get lost and forget their colors. Girls gather in the park, trying to remember what songs to sing. But the horses are too sick to bet on and a map is not the territory. Three skins convulse, three bodies converge. A sickness is shared between a girl and a boy and a boy and a river.

Jordaan Mason's debut novel, THE SKIN TEAM, is a story of mesmerized violence and the shape shifting between love and sex and the singing that happens when the power goes out.

"Reading THE SKIN TEAM, you would never suspect how difficult it is to write even fairly about such things, much less with Jordaan Mason's radiant emotional grace and super-deft detailing and flawless style. This novel is something very rare, and it's about as beautiful as fiction can ever be."—Dennis Cooper

Genres: Fiction, Queer, LGBT

226 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2013

About the author

jordaan mason is a confused human being who sometimes puts words together into sentences and sometimes sings those sentences in front of strangers very loudly or very quietly and sometimes they like to hold notes for as long as possible and sometimes they do not. they grew up on a river that connects two great lakes in a small town that had a lot of horses and they've been fucked up ever since. they are the author of the novels the skin team (2013) and the end of cinnamon (forthcoming) as well as the poetry collection swimming alone in the backyard (2014). they write and perform songs under their own name, as well as ambient-ish music under the name slow-blink & purring, and other kinds of music as part of the groups towards the forest (2016-2017), winter sisters (2014-present), the horse museum (2007-2010), and children eating birds (2005-2008). they also have made two short films called i'm really scared when i kill in my dreams (2013) and i don't mind waiting until it gets better (2016).

Reviews

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful, strange novel. This book takes a lot of the things my favorite poetry does and places it in the context of a novel. The closest parallel might be Blake Butler, but Blake tends to traffic in total human doom, whereas Jordaan is about love, romance, sex, sexuality, illness, loss, mourning, gender identity and horses.

You can read this book as poems, as beautiful language that just washes over you, but just about the time you do that, you will all of a sudden begin to notice the novel/plot structure creep in on you. Then you will get excited. You will start to look for the connections, start trying to decode the plot on a sentence level. You will fail. You will return to reading it as poems, as unconnected beauty and weird and heartholds, but then you will notice it picking up where it left off, or a character will do something and you will find yourself thinking "oh that totally makes sense". You're back in novel land again. It's a fun experience. This isn't a "difficult" novel, but it defies anything you try to put on it. It isn't quite anything else. It's the Skin Team. It's by Jordaan Mason.

And if you lives in Chicago and would like a copy of Jordaan Mason & The Horse Museum's magnum opus, "Divorce Lawyers I Shaved My Head" please let me know. I have a hundred of them and they are in a suitcase in my closet. I give them to everyone.

EDIT: I no longer live in chicago or have a hundred copies of Divorce Lawyers.

[Sofia · Rating 3 out of 5]

The start and end are really fucking good, just wish that sort of writing had been interleaved. Definitely listen to their (don't know whether pronouns are up-to-date) music beforehand, as they bounce off one another very well in parts, like particularly good remixes or sequels.

[Records herself singing in her room obnoxiously loudly/emotively to friends far-eloigned]

PS: Apparently they've another novel scheduled to be published sometime this year, and I was so happy I'd finally saved up enough money for the Jordaan Mason book >_> (I'll be getting their poetry collection, too, because they really do speak to me)

[ipsit]

The Skin Team reads like a patchwork catalog of bruises, weaving segmented blocks of methodical narrative threaded together into something kind of beyond categorization, as far as novels go. There’s a story here, but the story keeps mutating, and dissecting itself as it goes on trying to understand the strange relations between its characters. Bizarre teams named after colors ride horses through the woods, birds flock in the sky in disturbed patterns among smoke coming from nowhere, kids communicate hidden information about water telepathically, calm suicide notes concerned with jumping off of bridges quietly change hands between passively violent scenes of adolescent sex. “The horse’s death was not investigated,” reads a single sentence stranded on a page alone near the middle of the book, “mostly because all investigative energy was spent on figuring out who started the fire.” There is certainly a sense of the Lynchian, as well as the novels of Dennis Cooper, carried in sentences that together feel close to the same long slow gravity you might have felt exploring a strange relative’s house as a child, expecting on any wall to find a button that would open up into a larger, hidden room.

[Tobias · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review: http://www.vol1brooklyn.com/2013/08/2...

[Brooks Sterritt · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Three bones broken into three pieces each and then delivered to various geographic locations (one for each direction except north, to which nothing is delivered except electricity and ash)."

[Nathaniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

if Delany's Dhalgren were a YA novel, it would be a lot like this, I think.

[alysa · Rating 3 out of 5]

very pretty with some fun, moving vulgarity. metaphors are dense as hell, i’ll probably have to give it another read one day to fully grasp it.

[Travis Odom · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm pretty split on this one. Paragraph by paragraph, the sentences are beautiful, short, declarative, blunt, and truly poetic. But page by page, the story is disjointed; the plot hindered by the nonlinear structure. Having three unnamed characters isn't a bad thing, but when their voices are all so similar, it's near impossible to tell them apart - which admittedly might be the point, but didn't help me enjoy the book any more.