The Secret Skin is a novella that clocks in at just a hair over a hundred pages; despite that low page count, it seems hellbent on being derivative of as many novels as possible. June Vogel, you see, is returning to Storm Break, her family’s gothic estate on the Oregon Coast; the year is somewhere in the 1920s. Given that the book actually opens with the line, “Last night I dreamed of Storm Break,” you might expect this to be nothing but a Rebecca rip-off; but it is, in fact, a rip-off of so many other books as well. There’s a creepy doll, a creepy little girl who seems to have some sort of mysterious powers, the brooding presence of the narrator’s mother who seems to linger in Storm Break despite her death all those years ago. And then there are those other mysterious deaths from years ago and why are the servants acting so strangely? Could it be because of the arrival of June’s estranged brother and his new bride, returning to Storm Break for the first time since their marriage? Or perhaps there’s tension because of that black drifter in town looking for a job; the Vogel family has quite a racist history as you might guess. Does this sound like a ******* lot for a book that isn’t even 110 pages? Here’s the thing about The Secret Skin . . . oh, God, the title – I forgot to mention the debilitating and disfiguring skin condition that plagues the Vogel family that passes from generation to generation like some kind of curse. There are so many plot threads in this book that I couldn’t even remember them all. There’s simply no room to develop these plot threads to say nothing of, you know, concluding them in a dramatically satisfying way. The book lurches from derivative scene to derivative scene without adding anything of any real substance.
There is one exception, one thing the book adds to all of these hoary horror tropes and that’s an explicitly queer element. You know, there’s always a kind of taboo romance subplot in these kinds of books and in this one, it’s between June and her new sister-in-law. Anyway, representation is good, but there are a couple of issues here. First and foremost, the book has about as much time to dedicate to the queer relationship as it does to anything else which is almost none, so the relationship feels rushed and uninteresting and not fleshed out at all. Secondly, it is a little rich to say that one is “adding” a queer element to Rebecca; you might have noticed I said “explicitly queer” above and I meant that not in terms of the graphic nature of the sex (because it isn’t very graphic) but just in terms of the book straight up saying people are queer and a relationship is queer. Rebecca’s queer content remains ambiguous. Anyway, you can guess which approach I like better just speaking in literary terms, but explicit representation is good for other reasons. Still, that alone isn’t an excuse for a book this derivative, shallow and dissatisfying to exist. I suppose the more representation we get, the more mediocre representation we get. Still, I prefer the good stuff. ½ star.
tl;dr – painfully derivative horror novella crams in an absurd amount of plot threads and can’t develop any of them; queer representation is appreciated, but it’s as shallow as the rest of the book. ½ star.