Pirate’s Reviews > Skin > Status Update

“Lit from above like the last live human caught in God’s wandering eye.”

I’ve seen lots of reviews commenting on how they don’t like Kathe Koja’s writing style.

It reminds me of Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett, early 20th C hard boiled detective fiction. It’s heavy on vibes and atmosphere. Either you dig it or you don’t. I Love it.

I read this for the first time back in the late 1900s when it first came out, and it hit me like a a brick. Returning to it as an older, slower version of the young man who was so taken with the intensity of it at the time.

I remember this as a book about bodies and obsession and art, industrial tools and metal fabrication, love, bodies in motion, violence, and bleeding flesh.