author Albert Sanchez Piñol 13 Eki 2005

The Cold Skin

(la pell freda)

Playfully conscious of its B-movie plot, Cold Skin avoids the associated pitfalls. The narrator tells his story with detachment as he documents his experiences with the sea fiends. Rather like Lord of the Flies, an archetypal plot is an excuse for an extended meditation on man's propensity for violence.
found in The Guardian by *

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la pell freda (the cold skin) -

Shortly after World War I, a troubled man accepts a solitary assignment as a “weather official” on a tiny, remote island on the edges of the Antarctic. When he arrives, the predecessor he is meant to replace is missing and a deeply disturbed stranger is barricaded in a heavily fortified lighthouse. At first adversaries, the two find that their tenuous partnership may be the only way they survive the unspeakably horrific reptilian creatures that ravage the island at night, attacking the lighthouse in their organized effort to find warm-blooded food. Armed with a battery of ammunition and explosives, the weather official and his new ally must confront their increasingly murderous mentality, and, when the possibility of a kind of truce presents itself, decide what kind of island they will inhabit. Equal parts Stephen King, a phantasmagorical Robinson Crusoe, and Lord of the Flies , Cold Skin is literary horror that deals with the basist forms of human behavior imaginable, while exploring why we so vehemently fear the Other.

found on Good Reads