THE FLAYED MAN

A cursed woman races against time to save herself, her mother, and the woman she’s falling for.

When Ellis Karsten, a 31-year-old ER worker, sees a battered patient during her night shift, she thinks: “He smells like blood. I’m hungry.” In Lauter’s debut novel, Ellis, her manipulative mother, and her Uncle Bill look human, but they harbor a dark secret—they’ve been cursed to consume blood to stay on the right side of monstrous: “No one becomes like us. You’re either born human or born hungry.” While Uncle Bill supplies them with blood, Ellis cares for her mother, who has early onset dementia. Their already fraught relationship becomes increasingly untenable when her terrified mother says she’s being hunted by “the flayed man,” the brutal creature from their generational fables. When both Uncle Bill and their blood supply mysteriously disappear, Ellis is forced into the desert to find more blood and keep the curse at bay. Both afraid of her mother and scared to lose her, Ellis must race against an enemy seemingly older than time to save them both. Ellis’ complicated feelings about her family are the most compelling part of the novel. At one point, she thinks: “No one can ever understand me, can ever love me down to my bones and the snarling beast beyond, like family can.” This belief comes into question as she gets closer to Veer, a complicated and alluring paramedic, with equal parts caution and passion. Drawn together by their trauma, the two struggle against the reality of the curse. Set against the backdrop of Las Vegas and the Mojave Desert, the novel suffers under too much buildup and plot scaffolding; the horrors of the flayed man, in some ways, pale next to Ellis’ personal, familial, and romantic horrors. Despite this, Lauter shows promise with apt and affecting musings on shame, duty, love, and generational trauma.

An atmospheric debut exploring the difficulty of escaping one's past.