Book review: Dreadful Skin, Cherie Priest
Dreadful Skin is wonderful in some aspects. Things Priest does well: nice prose, great tension within scenes, some truly scary shit. Jack is horrifying, all the more so because you meet him when he is sane and learn that he is, in his better moments, dreadfully aware of what he does when the madness comes over him. (Having lived through at least 3 psychotic breaks in the lives of someone I loved, 2 of whom are children; watched as they descended into insanity, violence, and hatred, then as they climbed slowly out of that pit, I know how that knowledge can torture a soul.)
However, I now understand why editors shy away from multiple POV stories, why new writers are encouraged not to go there.
The characters' voices are too similar. The uneducated, young, emancipated, black woman making her way south because the North is too cold spoke in the same voice as the ship's captain harboring some dark secret from the war, and I could tell neither from the easy-go-lucky gambler. The reader is told a little more about the nun -- we're to believe she's compassionate, in search of truth -- but frankly, I don't yet see it in her actions. One character who appears later in the book (another female protagonist) does have a stronger, more unique voice and her character's path, though horrifying, is a good piece of writing.
The back cover promises that the book raises questions that the reader must grapple with; I have to say I was disappointed. Grappling is more than the occassional reference to God or thought fragment about truth: I want to be challenged to sympathize with the devil before I can be drawn into a moral or philisophical debate in any compelling way.
I found the best summation of my thoughts so far here, written by Gary Cramer: "In Dreadful Skin, not quite a collection nor quite a novel, Cherie Priest takes this almost too-familiar setup, which could spell narrative death in a less talented writer's hands, and imbues it with unexpected life. If the patched-together creature that results is somehow less than the sum of its parts, and I think it unfortunately is, it nevertheless shambles forth with an aura of foreboding and obfuscation that tantalizes just enough more than it torments to make this quick read more memorable than most other recent pastiches of timeworn monster/savior themes."
Read it? Yes, if you are an obsessed fan of all things supernatural or werewolves in particular. The prose is very nice, the story reasonably tense. If I discover some sort of nugget before I finish, I'll let you know ...