Skin Lane [Paperback]

"'Skin Lane is a fiendishly taut little psycho-shocker that recalls Simenon at his most hardboiled and Highsmith at her creepiest' Will Self 'A powerful and complex story of sexual obsession... a raw, dark, highly dramatic narrative... a profoundly original meditation on thwarted desire' Patrick McGrath 'Brilliantly eerie... constantly surprising... captures vividly the atmosphere of the changing London of the 60s... But it's in his depiction of a specific kind of helpless and fearful love that Bartlett excels' Guardian 'Skin Lane welds itself to your hands from first to last. Textured, teeming with menace and, at the end, deeply moving, it is an extremely fine piece of writing' The Times 'Original, disturbing and... beautifully written, this is an always fascinating work' Literary Review 'A potent fable about the destructive power of lust and an unsettling psychological study in the manner of Patricia Highsmith' Dally Telegraph 'With Skin Lane, Bartlett further demonstrates his skills as a creative polymath of the highest order' Dazed & Confused"

`Brilliantly eerie... constantly surprising... captures vividly the atmosphere of the changing London of the 60s... But it's in his depiction of a specific kind of helpless and fearful love that Bartlett excels'

`Skin Lane welds itself to your hands from first to last. Textured, teeming with menace and, at the end, deeply moving, it is an extremely fine piece of writing'

`A potent fable about the destructive power of lust and an unsettling psychological study in the manner of Patricia Highsmith'

SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA NOVEL AWARD 2007

`Fans of his first two novels will know what to expect. Skin Lane delivers in, well, skinfuls... a woderfully convincing portrait of the still workaday London... unforgettable moments in Skin Lane remind one of cinematic melodrama, equally of Douglas Sirk as of Jean Cocteau... The climactic scene is of such power and originality that I dare not spoil it, though it draws on that favourite biblical scene of Baroque artists: Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac' --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

At 47, Mr. F?s working life on London?s Skin Lane is one governed by calm, precision and routine. So when he starts to have frightening, recurring nightmares, he does his best to ignore them. The images that appear in his dream are disturbing ? Mr. F can't for the life of him think where they have come from. After all, he's a perfectly ordinary middle-aged man. As London?s crooked backstreets begin to swelter in the long, hot summer of 1967, Mr. F?s nightmare becomes an obsession. A chance encounter adds a face to the body that nightly haunts him, and the torments of his sweat-drenched nights lead him ? and the reader ? deeper into a terrifying labyrinth of rage, desire and shame. Part fairy-tale, part compelling evocation of a now-lost London, Neil Bartlett's critically-acclaimed third novel is his fiercest piece of writing yet: cruel, erotic, and tender.

Born in 1958, Neil Bartlett has spent twenty-five years at the cutting edge of British gay culture. His ground-breaking study of Oscar Wilde, Who Was That Man? paved the way for a queer re-imagining of history ; his first novel, Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall, was voted Capital Gay Book of The Year; his second, Mr Clive and Mr Page, was nominated for the Whitbread Prize. Both have since been translated into five European languages. Listing him as one of the country's fifty most significant gay cultural figures, the Independent said "Brilliant,beautiful, mischievous; few men can match Bartlett for the breadth of his exploration of gay sensibility". He also works as a director, and in 2000 was awarded an OBE for services to the theatre.

Skin Lane by Neil Bartlett Leadtext: "Under certain very particular circumstances, there may be some dispute as to who has jurisdiction over the body itself." The Coroner's Office: An Introduction Corporation of City of London Publications,1967 The stories we are told as children do, undoubtedly, mark us for life. They are often stories of dark and terrible things, and we are usually told them just before the lights are turned out and we are left alone; but we love them. We love them when we first hear them, and even when we are grown, and think we have forgotten them entirely, they never lose their power over us. The man who is the subject of this story had, when he was a little boy, one particular bedtime favourite. This was despite the fact that the old-fashioned book of fairy tales which contained it had only one picture, and that a small steel engraving printed in black and white. He would ask to be read this particular story again and again - every night, in fact. The voice that read him the story was, on some nights, calm, reassuring - as warm as lamplight; on other nights his father (for it was to his widowed father, and not to either of his older brothers, that the duty of the bedtime story fell) would be tired, and eager to get downstairs to his dinner, and could not conceal his irritation at being asked to rehearse the words of the story for the fourth time that week. The boy never especially paid attention to his father's mood, or tone of voice; he was rapt whether the sentences of the story were repeated clumsily or well. The first few pages never particularly interested him, but he never asked for them to be skipped; he would lie quite still, and wait patiently for the two moments in the telling of the story that he loved the most. The first was when the Beast, having lured the famished Beauty to his table with the promise of fine wine, and finer food - chickens with meat as white as milk, jellies as red as rubies - suddenly says out of nowhere "Beauty, will you be my wife?" and she, weak with hunger and terror, faints dead away; and the second was the story's very end. It wasn't the odd music of the final words about living in happiness "for years and years and many years to come" that he always looked forward to (he was of course too young to understand why his father sometimes read that sentence too quickly, as if eager to get to the full stop and back downstairs);nor was it the fireworks, or the strange sound of the invisible orchestra that played when the Beast's place at the dining table was suddenly taken (disappointingly, he always thought) by "the loveliest prince that ever eye beheld"- no; it was the quiet noise that the paper of the last page of the little book always made as his father turned it - a whisper meant for his ears only - because that meant that there, at the bottom of the last page of the story, there, at last, was the picture. He would always ask to see it. "Show me, show me-"he'd say, "I'm not frightened; show me." According to the picture ( - yes, I have the book here in front of me),the Beast is a small and oddly wounded-looking creature; small, dark and indeterminate. It snuffles, half in wonderment, half in ignorance - half bear, half boar - at the exposed neck and breast of a swooning, Empire-dressed Beauty, who has fallen backwards across a bed. Whether she is really asleep, or has fainted, or is merely playing dead, the little boy is never quite sure; but he can see that her eyes are firmly closed. The story over, and the picture inspected, the boy lets himself be told to go to sleep; he enjoys lying back on the clean white pillowcase and feeling his father's big hands tucking the weight and warmth of his very own paisley-printed eiderdown firmly down around him. Then he lies straight and still, with his feet together and his arms down by his sides, like he's been told (like a good boy),and listens for the three last sounds that he hears his house make each evening; the soft, satisfying click of the bedroom light switch; the gentle shutting of the bedroom door; and then, finally, his father's footsteps making their way across the landing and down the stairs. He lies there in the dark, and counts the steps (seven, eight) - watching the strip of light under the bedroom door (thirteen, fourteen);waiting for the moment when his father will reach the bottom of the stairs and turn the landing light out. Then, and only then, when both the darkness and the silence are complete, will he prepare to close his eyes. Before he closes them, there is something that he has to do. First, he pulls down the eiderdown; then he unbuttons the top two buttons of his pyjama jacket, uncovering his chest to the air. Next, he twists his whole body slightly to one side, rearranging his legs and arms under the covers so that he is now lying just as Beauty is lying in the picture - eyes closed, breast exposed, head thrown back to one side, luxuriant black ringlets spread across the pillow. And then he waits, just as he knows she must have waited all those nights.Waits, for the first sound of snuffling in the dark. For the first touch of bristle or guard-hair on his cheek. For the first hot, stinking breath to brush against his neck. Here it comes. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.