Skin Thief, Suzan Palumbo

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language: English
country: Trinidad and Tobago/Canada
year: 2018-2022 (published 2023)
form: short fiction
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 6.6.25-12.6.25

Suzan Palumbo’s short story collection Skin Thief is a collection of twelve fantasy short stories, drawing heavily on Caribbean (and especially Indo-Caribbean) folklore and culture. not every story totally landed/worked for me, but there’s some really good stuff in here, and I definitely think the collection is worth a read.

some highlights:

• the first story, “The Pull of the Herd”, comes out really strong with a story about a shape-changing woman caught between two worlds: the forest-dwelling “doefolk” she grew up with and the human world she’s drawn to beyond the forest, which threatens the survival of her family. this was probably my favorite story in the collection.
• “Of Claw and Bone” is a really compelling short (only 8 pages) story about a world where people’s lives and personalities are linked to animal bones, about a girl determined to escape her father’s violence and not to be like her vole-linked mother.
• the longest story in the collection, and the only one not previously published, “Kill Jar”, is about a girl growing up in isolation in her father’s laboratory, where he studies poisonous plants and animals.
• “Laughter Among the Trees”, about a young woman whose sister vanished when they were children, haunted / consumed by the life she imagines her sister could have lived.

all of the stories are quite dark; the least-dark are probably “Her Voice, Unmasked”, about an automaton escaping her creator’s control, and “Propagating Peonies”, about two people caught in a cycle of reincarnation, drawn constantly back to each other. also maybe “Personal Rakshasi”, about a young woman trying to come to terms with the malevolent being haunting her. but none of those is exactly a lighthearted romp, either, lol.

Palumbo’s characters are grappling with grief, guilt, and the effects of many kinds of violence — gendered/sexual, parental, unintended — but the stories don’t, typically, offer comfort or consolation. rather, they often explore what happens when people make the wrong choices, when their coping mechanisms are maladaptive, when they simply can’t stop, or when they do get out but only at a significant cost. the ones I liked best fall mainly into that last category, though “Laughter Among the Trees” (maladaptive coping mechanism to the extreme) also really fucked me up (this is a good thing). queerness runs throughout the collection, and I appreciate that Palumbo neither sanitizes it (making her queer characters perfect victims) nor presents it as a too-easy way out (queer desire does not save these characters, though it certainly often changes them).

the one story that didn’t really work for me is the last, “Douen”, which apparently was nominated for both a Nebula and the World Fantasy Award. stuff aimed at adults but written from children’s perspectives (albeit in this case a dead child) is always tough to pull off, and for me this one just didn’t quite manage it. the last line was good, but it definitely didn’t have the emotional impact that it was intended to.

anyway, good book! check out Suzan Palumbo’s short fiction!

moods: dark, emotional, reflective

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