George R.R. Martin’s Skin Trade


Adapted by Daniel Abraham & Mike Wolfer (Avatar Press)
ISBN: 978-1-59291-233-9

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: A Dark Delight for a Winter’s Night… 9/10

George Raymond Richard Martin has been selling stories since 1970 and winning major awards for them since 1975. As well as his stunning output of dark, emotive, melancholic multilayered novels and short stories in a variety of genres, he has also successfully pursued a parallel career in television (and movies) and even finds time to teach.

His series A Song of Ice and Fire became the TV sensation A Game of Thrones.

Born in Bayonne, New Jersey in 1948, Martin was active in early comics fandom and studied journalism at Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois). He remains close to the funnybook and sci fi fan scenes to this day.

At the top of his form he is one of the most potent fantasy voices in the business, with short stories and novels that are witty, compulsive, imaginatively dark, tinged with wry black humour and always uniquely nuanced and atmospheric.

In 1988 his captivating yarn Skin Trade appeared in the fantasy anthology Night Visions 5 (a series he was editing which numbered Steven King, Clive Barker and Ramsey Campbell amongst the contributors) offering a decidedly fresh and different interpretation of one of the most hoary (not a misprint) bête noires in fiction…

Now that tale (which won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella in 1989) has been adapted as a miniseries by scripter Daniel Abraham and illustrator Mike Wolfer and subsequently collected into a slim and sinister trade paperback to delight another generation of fear freaks who loving feeling their own skins crawl…

Randi Wade is a private detective with a lot of baggage. Not surprising when you think of how her cop dad died years ago. In circumstances still not fully explained, Frank Wade was torn to pieces by some kind of animal at the local meat-packing plant…

Still not over it, she divides her time between bread-and-butter cases whilst investigating the historic killing off the books. Her best friend is effete ineffectual asthmatic Willie Flambeaux – as a repo man, he’s even in the same sort of business – and one night he offers insights regarding a particularly brutal contemporary murder which change Randi’s life forever…

Willie knew the deceased and, assuming Joan Sorenson‘s horrific demise will be covered up by the investigating officers, asks Randi to get involved. He was supposed to meet the victim on the night she died and might be suspect but the real problem is what his own snooping has uncovered.

Joan was found mutilated and might even have been partially consumed by her attacker… just like Randi’s dad…

Willie has not told his friend everything however and later starts calling a few old acquaintances: men like financier Jonathan Harmon, the dark, wealthy untouchable powerbroker whose clan has been secretly running the city forever…

Randi taps her other sources, questioning Barry Shumacher, Editor of The Courier and one of her father’s oldest friends. He tells her there’s no connection to the new killing but she knows he’s lying…

Convinced she’s on to something Randi then storms into police HQ for a conversation with her dad’s old partner and discovers Chief Joe Urquart reviewing files from the missing persons case Frank Wade was working at the time of his death.

It seems the suspect put away for the crimes is out again, but Frank always felt they had the wrong guy anyway. Rather than big, simple-minded poor kid Roy Helander, he favoured the frighteningly strange son of Jonathan Harmon as the perp behind a spate of child disappearances…

Willie meanwhile has been summoned to the Harmon home for an audience with the patriarch and his just-not-right heir Steven…

The case takes a disturbing turn after Randi and Willie compare notes. Joan’s death is apparently unconnected to the cold case as she was chained in silver and flayed before the killer made off with her skin. What Randi doesn’t, disclose is the fact that in Frank’s old files she found a note from prime suspect Roy which simply said “It was a werewolf”…

And then a friend on the force informs her that there’s been a second killing. Someone else close to good old Willie has been skinned alive, and Randi arrives at a terrifying, inescapable conclusion…

All of that is mere scene-setting for the shocks, twists and surprises still in store for Randi as two 20-year mysteries are finally resolved, appalling ambitions and dark desires uncovered and apex predators become cowering victims for something which preys on monsters…

Accompanied by a fifteen-page gallery of covers-&-variants, this splendidly effective blend of crime caper and supernatural thriller is a pure visceral delight no lover of spooky chills can dare to miss.

© 2014 Avatar Press. Skin Trade and all related properties ™ and © 2014 George R. R. Martin.