A review by branch_c
The Skinner by Neal Asher

2.0

First I’ve read by Asher, and I’m afraid it will likely be the last.  Sure, there’s some cool use of SF concepts, the characters are interesting, the writing is polished, and the pacing is on target.  But the endless litany of bodily damage is way over the top.  A more measured approach might have been to include just a bit of this harshness at strategic points, to emphasize the danger of the alien environment, and the parallel to the humans’ behavior would have been clear.  But with some sort of violent injury or death on practically every page or two (of a 439 page book), it seems more like an obsession than a plot element, and it becomes tiresome long before the end of the book.