Skin

by Kathe Koja

Book Overview

Tess burns. Bibi cuts. Together they create chaos, love, pain, and unstoppable art, in SKIN, the story of a partnership that sparks like flying metal and bleeds like a breaking heart. A classic of queer horror, with a brand new introduction from Eric LaRocca.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1946154903
• ISBN13: 9781946154903
• Release Date: April 2025
• Publisher: Meerkat Press
• Length: 250 Pages

Customer Reviews

Skin by Kathe Koja is like nothing I have read before!

I was looking for something that was similar to Billy Martin (Poppy Z. Brite). This was different but had the level of uniqueness that I wanted. Something I liked especially is the imagery and they way Kathe Koja describes Tesses art work. You definitely don't see that much in other horror novels. I love the style of prose. If you liked this book I recommend reading Billy Martin's early work, and Silk by Caitlin R. Kiernan.

Flesh and steel

Koja explores the limits of flesh in SKIN,chronicling the desire to transcend these limits in her own unique style.This is a great modern novel concerning extreme bodymodification and the physiological scars it leaves; itis also an accurate look at underground culture. Koja is one of our very best writers,and SKIN is a classic.

One of many amazing Koja novels

This was the first Kathe Koja book I ever read, and it was not the last. This book was great on so many different levels. I loved the writing style, long sentences and all. I especially loved the characters, Bibi and Tess, and the secondary characters of the performance troupe - they were presented as true artists of the industrial culture, the ideas at the heart of industrial music and its fans, not poseur whiny kids in cute black clothes. (Aside from Koja, I recommend Poppy Z. Brite and Caitlin R. Kiernan for getting past cliches of kids in subcultures.) This book was real and raw and different. I don't think the author was trying to "push" homosexuality on a reader or exploit it for book sales. What do people want? A label on books that says: Warning: Contents May Offend or Challenge Your Sensibilities? That's what good books are supposed to do! If one wants a label that says the opposite, perhaps one should look for books with Koontz and Rice embossed nice and shiny on the cover.

Wow.

I most faithfully believe that SKIN sets a standard by which all books of the "darker" genre should be measured. This book is indeed dark, but it is also incandescent. I am by no means an uncritical reader, so when I say that, page after page, SKIN had me breathless, touched, and completely floored, I sincerely mean it. Kathe Koja is a passionate, visceral writer, gifted with the uncommon knack for gorgeous and hallucinatory prose. Reading SKIN, I could not help but feel moved -- it seemed as though I had been waiting a long, long time to come in contact with something so extremely alive and so extremely rarefied - so unrelentingly beautiful - that, no matter how lame or drastic this sounds, I almost felt as if I were coming home to something; something unfamiliar yet completely familiar, something untouched that had been waiting to be touched, waiting patiently until given the proper stimulus: SKIN. No artist - in fact, no one, period - can afford not to read this book. It's raw, it's affecting, it's painful, it's profound -- the distillate of life compressed into 389 wonderful pages.

A book even better than its cover..

Picked up this book from a thrift shop intending to use the cover art in a collage. Upon reading the book I was astounded that I had never heard of Kathe Koja up to that point. (Several years ago.) She is definitely the most under appreciated author of this generation. Skin is full on masterful prose and while I wouldn't recommend it to my mother, I have recommended it to most of my friends. Needless to say, the book is on my shelf, cover intact.

The best horror novel of all time.

There isn't much to say about Kathe Koja's _Skin_ except this: read it. Read it now. Sculptor Tess Bajac is looking for ways to pay the rent. Through a sometime boyfriend, she's introduced to Bibi, a performance artist who sees the potential for a collaboration between the two. They for a troupe and a friendship, and both warp, twist, and degrade, slowly but surely. Enough plot twists to keep the reader guessing, but even if there weren't, Koja's skill with the written word is so masterful that it wouldn't matter. The writing style is as bleakly compelling as the novel's subject. Worth finding and reading at all costs. The best horror novel ever written, and one of the five or so best books of all time.