THE HOUSE OF SKIN is a literary surrealist horror/thriller novelette for fans of Carmen Maria Machado and Clarice Lispector.
Synopsis:
At a gallery one night, a young sculptor meets Cyan, an art collector with a turquoise beard, a detached charm, and a wife recently dead. Bewitched by him and his posse of elegant friends, the sculptor agrees to accompany them to a party and finds herself plunged into their world of eccentric decadence. Cyan and his clique are worshipped by flocks of struggling artists, all desperate to be discovered. When Cyan invites her to complete a residency at his mansion home, the sculptor believes her big break has finally come.
But what is it about the house that so unnerves her? And how much will she sacrifice for success?
Where does a woman's life end and her art begin?
66 pages.
Perfect bound with spine.
ISBN: 979-8-88862-264-3
Published on 28 March 2023.
Praise for The House of Skin:
"Written with flair, intelligence, and a wonderful smattering of dark humour, you'll devour this vivid and compelling novella!" - Rebecca Netley, author of The Whistling
"Creepy, surreal, and quietly hilarious" - Clare Fisher, author of How the Light Gets In
"Karina Lickorish Quinn's prose is deliciously dark and moreish. In the House of Skin, Quinn produces a satire of the art world that is witty and mesmerizingly strange. Her work reminds me of the intoxicating quality of Angela Carter's most sinister fairy tales." - Naomi Booth, author of Animals at Night, Sealed, and Exit Management
"Where does a woman's life end and her art begin? From the wildly talented Karina Lickorish Quinn comes the tale of a house suffused with dread, inside which shift the unsettling friendships of a mysterious art world clique. Breathtakingly inventive, The House of Skin fuses the compulsive suspense of a Gothic page-turner with artfully wrought, sensuous prose. Lickorish Quinn's writing bristles with wit whilst burrowing knowingly under the reader's skin. This sophisticated thriller is the very thing it dissects, a work of art that will seduce and stun you, and one that you won't soon forget." - Kate Horsley, author of The Monster's Wife
Karina Lickorish Quinn is a Peruvian-British writer whose first novel The Dust Never Settles was published by Oneworld in the UK and Commonwealth in 2021. The Spanish translation, El Polvo Nunca Se Asienta (Arde, 2022), was chosen as a summer must-read by the national Spanish TV channel La Sexta. She has been hailed by Antonio Iturbe in La Vanguardia as a 'powerful literary voice full of echoes'. Her short stories have been published in The White Review online, Asymptote, Wasafiri , Palabritas, The Journal of Latina Critical Feminism and in Un Nuevo Sol, the first anthology of British-Latinx writing. Karina Lickorish Quinn is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway University of London.