Lisa Tuttle Review: Skin Deep

I recently found a YouTube channel called Monster of the Week. It updates old, forgotten monsters from older editions of Dungeons and Dragons. While classic monsters are great, I enjoy the unusual ones, monsters I’d never heard of before. In some cases, they do things I never anticipated a monster of doing. That’s part of the reason that I enjoyed Lisa Tuttle’s “Skin Deep.”

After finishing all of her stories in A Nest of Nightmares, I found another of Tuttle’s collections, Memories of the Body: Tales of Desire and Transformation.

In “Skin Deep,” Danny, a young Texan, vacations in France after being unceremoniously dumped by his girlfriend back home. He thinks he’s in luck when he meets two English women on holiday as well as an exotic woman from parts unknown. It turns out that he wasn’t as lucky as he’d imagined.

Tuttle is a native Texan who moved to Europe and I recognized several reoccurring motifs that “Skin Deep” shared with other of her stories.

One broad similarity is a deliberate breaking of artificial literary conventions. (I know different people use the same term to mean different things–I’m using “convention” to mean something that doesn’t happen in real life but we accept in a story. For example, 555 telephone numbers and mild swearing on television.)

As taught in film studies, one convention-breaking element of French New Wave cinema is when characters were having a conversation in a restaurant, whenever the front door opened, noise from the street would overwhelm the audio, drowning out the characters. On one hand, that is how sounds work in real life and the directors were demonstrating how phony Hollywood was. On the other hand, obscuring the characters’ dialogue is annoying and makes the film hard to follow.

That’s the question: do you want it true to life or easy to follow? I struggled to answer that.

Several Spoilers Ahead

Danny is neither overly sympathetic or unsympathetic, but has elements of both.

After initially getting chummy with Danny, the English women later snub him. We don’t learn why (as is often the case in real life).

In his final encounter with the exotic woman, Danny commits some acts of stupidity but later wises up.

Whatever the strange woman was, she neither killed and ate Danny or was defeated by him.

Danny (and the reader) never figure out what she was or even what she really looked like. She uses several words that Danny doesn’t understand. Would the reader? We’ll never know–we’re not privy to them.

Danny never learns the truth about the woman’s true form or even what she wanted. She left her discarded skin behind (several details hinted at a reptilian nature but her skin reminded me of a molted exoskeleton, possibly by a mantis or spider). Did she want to eat Danny, mate with him, both, neither? Again, we’ll never know.

This ambiguity makes “Skin Deep” feel more like a real life horrific event, not so much like a horror story. It reminded me of Algernon Blackwood, not in the least bit due to writing style, but because it feels like a creepy story someone might tell you in real life, swearing it was all true.

The thing is, as with French New Wave, “Skin Deep” feels more believable but doesn’t have quite the impact of more conventional horror.

I imagine every reader has preferences that are as unique as fingerprints. Some readers would sacrifice verisimilitude for explanations. Others would not.

We don’t see much of whatever the mystery woman actually was. Some readers might feel cheated but I appreciate the atmosphere that Tuttle created. As I said, the story isn’t quite my optimal blend of convention-breaking and convention-maintaining, but the hints of the woman’s true nature drew me in and the shell she left behind was a memorable detail.

I look forward to the rest of the collection.