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A review by vylotte
Under the Skin by Michel Faber
3.0
I've had this book sitting on my to-read shelf for years. I saw it at a thrift store once and, intrigued, I picked it up. But as with all our best intentions, real life and a replenishing stack of library books kept getting in the way.
It wasn't until I saw the eerie and powerful movie version that it moved into the forefront of my mind again. And with most stories that I see the film first, it was painted over my imagination as I read the story. Imagine my surprise when I realized they are basically nothing alike, at all.
Yes, there is the alien, masquerading as a human woman, picking up hitchhikers for nefarious reasons. But where the movie was sexual and sensual and haunting, the book was a lot more clinical. The internal dialogue of a true alien, a woman surgically butchered and dropped into a world more lush and alive than she could ever imagine, unfortunately over-populated with the delicious and plentiful "sub-humans" that are just smart and dangerous enough to have to outwit instead of just butcher. We see, in depth, the support system that lay back at her house, the outpost slaughterhouse of a dying world.
It was not what I was expecting and I'm glad. The movie can stand alone as the barest sliver of the idea of this book, and this can stand as the story of a damaged woman fleeing a dying planet with no purpose but what she and possibly others like her can harvest and send home.
It wasn't until I saw the eerie and powerful movie version that it moved into the forefront of my mind again. And with most stories that I see the film first, it was painted over my imagination as I read the story. Imagine my surprise when I realized they are basically nothing alike, at all.
Yes, there is the alien, masquerading as a human woman, picking up hitchhikers for nefarious reasons. But where the movie was sexual and sensual and haunting, the book was a lot more clinical. The internal dialogue of a true alien, a woman surgically butchered and dropped into a world more lush and alive than she could ever imagine, unfortunately over-populated with the delicious and plentiful "sub-humans" that are just smart and dangerous enough to have to outwit instead of just butcher. We see, in depth, the support system that lay back at her house, the outpost slaughterhouse of a dying world.
It was not what I was expecting and I'm glad. The movie can stand alone as the barest sliver of the idea of this book, and this can stand as the story of a damaged woman fleeing a dying planet with no purpose but what she and possibly others like her can harvest and send home.