SKINLESS

In Moor’s novel, a woman navigates abuse, crime, and the trauma that follows both.

Within Charmay are three people: The first and primary persona, “Charmay,” is an aspiring singer-songwriter confronting an abusive past and enduring an increasingly violent marriage. “Cindy,” her alter ego, is an exotic dancer with an iron will to survive. She is enthusiastic and educated—everything Charmay wants to be. “Skinless” is Charmay’s internal antagonist. Skinless forces Charmay’s traumatic past as a survivor of sexual abuse and homelessness to the fore while echoing every brutal insecurity Charmay has ever had about herself and every insult her mother ever hurled at her. It is Charmay’s intrusive tormentor, sabotaging opportunities to further her career and creating a barrier between who Charmay is and who she had to become to survive. As Charmay navigates the grittier parts of New York City in 1999, she must claw her way through exploitative relationships with men and an indifferent entertainment industry. When Rex Revan, a patron of the club where Charmay dances, offers “Cindy” a transactional relationship with the father figure she never had, Charmay’s cool facade begins to falter. Charmay’s story is not one of redemption, but of survival and resilience. Moor’s poetic, stream-of-consciousness prose drops readers directly into the mind of a trauma survivor, and the experience can be as unmooring as Charmay’s life experiences. (It “felt to me like I’d been born with some cursed mongo antennae inside; soaks up all the nasty, pus-filled wounds of the world. I often had to hunker down, submerge, to re-up—sometimes get intuitions on how to go back out, handle people.”) Equally profound is the author’s careful unpacking of a common, problematic archetype in the noir genre. On the surface, Charmay might come across as a typical femme fatale, an object of desire and danger, but her gifts for introspection and observation make her the perfect lynchpin for the author’s subversion. She’s not the object of an external gaze—she’s a character with agency and authority. Some readers may have difficulty following Charmay’s fractured perspective, but those who surrender to the flow will be rewarded.

A deeply moving, deliciously weighty work of fiction.