Alex Brown Reviews Skin Thief: Stories by Suzan Palumbo
Skin Thief: Stories, Suzan Palumbo (Neon Hemlock Press 978-1-95208-672-4, $18.99, 186pp, tp) September 2023. Cover by Mia Minnis.
Anytime a book published by Neon Hemlock lands at my doorstep, I drop everything to read it. Every story is unique in content and powerful in its queerness. I never know what I’m going to get, except that it’s going to be good. When Brent Lambert’s A Necessary Chaos and Suzan Palumbo’s Skin Thief: Stories turned up, I cannot tell you how excited I was. I’ve enjoyed their work in the past and was eager to spend more time in the weird worlds they create.
Palumbo’s Skin Thief: Stories pulls together twelve short stories written or published between 2018 and 2022. The stories are dark and haunting and lavishly queer. Palumbo mines her Trinidadian and Canadian/Western heritages alike, blending her experiences together in a way that is both speculative and rooted in what feels like truth. Palumbo always leaves me feeling unmoored and prickly, thrilled and frightened. Readers new to her work and returning fans will each find things to love about this collection. There are no weak stories in the bunch.
As Palumbo points out in the author’s note, the stories are ordered in a way that shift increasingly from Western settings and language to Trinidadian settings and language, reflecting Palumbo’s own personal journey. “In a way, this represents my own evolution as a writer and person, struggling with who and what I am, and the liminal space I occupy as not wholly Canadian or Trinidadian.” This progression definitely comes through. The collection opens with “The Pull of the Herd”, a story that evokes the Celtic and Norse legend of the selkie, in which a man who steals her sealskin can force her to become his wife. A woman tries to save her deer family from hunters who, since they can’t capture them as wives, decide to shoot them all. The final story is “Douen”, written in Trinidadian dialect about a creature from Trinidadian folklore.
Now, I’d already read most of the stories in Skin Thief, but it should tell you how much I relish Suzan Palumbo’s writing that I reread all of them anyway. Of the stories in this collection, two stood out: “Tara’s Mother’s Skin” and “Of Claw and Bone”. I’m not the only one compelled by Palumbo’s words, either. “Laughter Among the Trees” and “Douen” have, between them, been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Aurora, and WSFA Small Press awards.
The new story here is the novelette “Kill Jar”, and it’s just as sharp and vicious as the rest. Adelaide grows up in largely empty manor run by her father, a scientist who is as if Victor Frankenstein and Mr. Rochester had a love child, then abandoned him to be raised in the gothic horror world from Seanan McGuire’s Down Among the Sticks and Bones. Adelaide’s only friend (and her crush) is the daughter of the housekeeper, Clara. Her whole life is spent trapped behind the walls of the estate, and her happiness is entirely dependent on her father’s whims. Even her sleep is dependent upon taking a potion he makes specifically for her. When she encounters a talking snake in the garden, her world cracks open a little wider. When she learns the truth about how her mother died, that crack becomes a chasm.
Alex Brown is a librarian, author, historian, and Hugo-nominated and Ignyte award-winning critic who writes about speculative fiction, young adult fiction, librarianship, and Black history.
This review and more like it in the December and January 2023 issue of Locus.
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