Skin

    

    

    New York. Tess is a sculptor, obsessed by metal, by making it move, making it speak. Bibi is a dancer, her goal more than just motion - she likes darker, bloodier practices. Together they embark on a dangerous partnership; and as their attempts to transcend the limits of the physical body grow more horrific, so they move ever closer to the edges of death…

    

    

    
From Publishers Weekly

    This humorless novel about art punks in an unnamed present-day city is long on form and short on content. The main character, Tess Bajac, is an earnest young sculptor who lives for her work, so much so that readers may well long for her to do something besides make anther sculpture. She does all too rarely. Tess meets Bibi Bloss, a fey dancer, and they establish Surgeons of the Demolition, a performance art troupe whose shows combine Tess's mobile, menacing, robotlike constructions with Bibi's dancers and much fake blood. Koja devotes endless pages to details of their productions, and the vicissitudes of the protagonists' relationship have to suffice for drama. Their main source of conflict is Bibi's growing compulsion to mortify her flesh via piercing, tattooing and scarification. Readers will find it hard to relate to such a rarefied concern, especially since the roots of Bibi's obsession are never explored. Koja (
The Cipher
) has a considerable talent for evoking atmosphere, but her style, an obscurantist mix of stark minimalism and florid gush, further distances the characters from the reader and hampers the novel's already minimal movement. The ending is merely a jarring, long-overdue bit of business; on the whole the novel, like the art of the characters it portrays, is a sustained exercise in style over substance.

    

    

    
From Library Journal

    In horror novelist Koja's third novel, which explores the performance art scene, artistic vision evolves into dementia. Sculptor Tess Bajac agrees to incorporate her metal constructs into dancer Bibi Bloos's performance pieces, which include violence and tribal ritual. Bibi slowly draws Tess into an emotional and physical relationship that is overshadowed by Bibi's increasing preoccupation with transcending the limits of her body through cutting, scarring, and piercing. From the opening paragraph, Koja (
The Cipher
, Dell, 1991) creates a gritty, claustrophobic, unsettling mood through heavily descriptive prose, engulfing the reader in a world of burning steel, aberration, and self-destruction. This is a dark and frightening work by a major talent whose prose reads like a collaboration between Clive Barker and William S. Burroughs. Highly recommended for contemporary fiction collections.

    

    

    
From Kirkus Reviews

    Torqued! Twisted, man, as the new Abyss line plunges forward with its plan to advance through the frontiers of psychological horror. Koja fulfills Abyss's hopes with a savage hymn to industrial culture-a first hardcover whose breakthrough originality is unique but will leave many fighting off its overload. Metal sculptor Tess Bajac's days are spent scrabbling through junkyards, scraping bucks together through odd jobs as a welder, and soldering poems in steel. Unlike many in the field, who shape abstracts out of found objects, Tess does her own welding. (Koja at times follows the imitative fallacy and welds scrap sentences into Burroughs-like cutup paragraphs that mimic her heroine's sculpture. Which can be hard on the reader.) Into Tess's life creeps Bibi, a dancer turned artist in body metal, blood, burns, scars, and pain. Tess longs for motion in her sculpture. Bibi brings it, making love-dances to the sharp-edged pieces that leave her ripped and bleeding. Together with some dirty young dudes and studs who are artists in explosives and weird soundtapes and strobe lights, they form a group called the Surgeons and put on Grand Guignol horror shows that make them famous among subcultures. Then Bibi's lover Paul is killed during one show, the Surgeons fold, and Bibi splits from Tess, who desponds. Later, even more beringed through all the lips on her body, Bibi returns and seduces Tess into her first lesbian tie. But Bibi is bent and invents endless injustices on Tess's part so that she can justify more scars, pain, and body metal. A strong stylist, Koja makes white-hot the pains of metal sculpting and draws a big picture of S&M bars and byways before bringing on her big show as Bibi decides to go all the way and, with razor and scalpel, just about get out of her skin-or help a friend out of his. Beyond the styptic pencil and safety blades.

    

    

    
'Ultimately as dangerous as any fever-dream of Lovecraft or Poe. Koja's own attitude will prove… close to that of classic horror. The passion to create… something transcendent.'

    
-Locus

    

    
'One of the hottest names to turn up in years… She is dynamite… Genuinely terrifying…'

    
-The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction

    

    
'Visionary talent… Full of corporeal and spiritual horror… Incredibly beautiful… The most provocative new voice in horror since Clive Barker…'

    
-Fangoria

    

    

    
P.
(scaning & OCR) &
P.
(formating & proofing) edition.

    

    

    
For Rick and Aaron

    
Always mine

    

    

    I would like to thank Jim Pallas for his technical advice, and especially my father, Bruno Koja, for his endless patience with endless questions.

    I would also like to acknowledge a special debt to Re/Search Publications, whose Modern Primitives and Industrial Culture Handbook were invaluable resources for me.

    And as always, my great and special thanks and love to Rick Lieder, for all the indefinables, for everything.

    

    

    

    
Every idea is an incitement.

    
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

    

    Dust. Above a party store, liquor, lotto, keno machines fed by the poorest of the poor with coins rattled black by pocket tumbling, machine sounds nervous as a nervous cough. Grit-rimmed eyes, grit beneath her nails like powdered bone, fresh solder burn on her inner wrist a party-red, still too sore even to bandage. Dirt like sugar between her teeth.

    Already dark, and she thought about going downstairs, scraping change for a sandwich, a bottled drink maybe. She had been working all day, sweaty and burned, heavy pants stuck ragged to the backs of her legs. On the worktable the sculpture's long arms lay maddening in static; beautiful; what difference did that make? Her arms were long, too, knotty with muscle, throwing metal around had made her strong. Now away from the table to stretch, bending awkward to tug at her body, a little
Oh
of pain when a joint pulled wrong; stretching harder.

    The whole room was less than three meters wide, absurdly long from door to fencing wall: floor scraped to splinters past the overlay of her workspace, hemmed by the inscrutable orange wall of the welding panels oblique as any antique screen. Near the worktable a green metal rack, half-drawered, hung deft and messy with tools, cables, filter masks, welding helmet and goggles; forming a bandy L, a battered couch-bed, table with cooking tools, an empty sink. In the farthest corner wavy green plastic, chest-high to partially shield a toilet and stand-up shower box reminiscent of a Porta-John, with the same faint chemical flavor; stripping as she crossed the room, into the instant sting, leaving it cold to soothe her burned wrist, faint pepper of burns across her cheek.

    Strings of wet hair in her eyes, towel as bright as her burn; someone had stolen it for her, hotel name stenciled into the heavy fabric. A rich person's towel. The casement windows were chicken-wired but she had found a way to open them; no breeze tonight, somebody's radio harsh with distortion. Drunk laughter, a girl, somebody else saying, "Squeeze me, chita, come on," as if the act might be completed there in the street; the girl laughed again, the glossy humor of denial.

    Long legs stepping into cotton pants torn off at the knees, thin T-shirt and hair scooped heavy into a wet topknot tied with a jaunty twist of speaker wire. Scuffed steel-toed ankle boots thick on the risers, kicking gently at the paint-skinned door separating the stairs from the party store's entrance, where the manager was now counting half-smashed cartons of cigarettes.

    "Hey, Tess," coolly, still counting. Still mad about the smoke, probably; her complaints were getting more frequent, but then again where could she find a tenant so oblivious? Tess moved past her into the dirty warren of the store, everything leaky or cheap or plastic, half-crushed boxes and dusty greeting cards, keno machines loud and blurry and two white guys in black T-shirts ceaselessly pumping quarters. Half a liter of white grape juice cool in her hand, a box of crackers, two handfuls of change and the girl behind the counter scowled, big hair, big fake earrings shiny with scratched gold. "Whyn't you try paying with real money?"

    "Want me to count it for you?"

    A deeper scowl, scraping it across the counter into her hand. "Bitch," underbreath but just loud enough to be heard, but already Tess had turned, past hearing and up the stairs again to sit in the circle of white, juice and crackers and new sweat already trickling down her forehead before the moveless sculpture lying in its trench of spatter and shine.

    Showering again, spurts and gurgles of unpredictable heat, she had slept for less than four hours and felt it. Today was her day for the scrapyard, jagged landscape and you needed those steel-toed shoes, sturdy beggar with a heavy bag, reinforced canvas and sometimes it ripped anyway. Her sunglasses hung on a black vinyl string around her long neck; she put them on as soon as she got outside, almost ninety and not even noon.

    She had no car now, had sold it to get breathing room on the rent, missed it more each trip to the scrapyard-small harvests, without a car-and now not much room left to breathe, either; she would be out of money soon, out on the street maybe, or maybe her piece would sell at the show: THE ART OF STEEL. What a joke. Five guys with dayjobs and two professors, metals used as just another tool in the larger service of introducing one's name to the art journals,
New Art Quarterly
,
Art NOW
. Needless angles, curlicues and avant bobbing birdfeeders, the ones who thought a jagged weld made the whole piece gritty; as if to name it real would make it so. Worst of all no one did their own work, their own welds, she had asked enough questions to get sure. She was the only woman in the show: maybe they were getting state money and had to let her in. Tonight was the opening. She did not want to go but would, for the food, and to see if, maybe, maybe, somebody would buy her piece. Which was ridiculous. Empty bag against her shoulder like a flopping flap of skin, skirting the back of a moving bus, halo of fumes. Dry eyes burning behind her sunglasses, dark as welder's goggles.

    The scrapyard was not far but seemed so. Burn on her wrist chafed by the too-tight bandage, she had to jockey for entrance, the manager in the mood to charge double and said so. On the counter was a disassembled eight-gauge nibbler, the parts runny, frozen like cooled lava. "I can fix that for you," Tess said. "Got a glue gun?"

    "You got half an hour," the manager said. "That's it."

    Landscape of iron and rusty teeth pointing at the sun, she climbed carefully, doubting each step; tetanus shots were expensive. Once she had tumbled through an unstable pile, incongruous whoop of surprise as something grabbed, ripped, tore; she still had the marks on her right arm, long spiderweb scarring thin as machine lace. Here a flotsam of something black, very much like the nibbler but webbed in sagging cable and the blistered strips of some heavy plastic casing; it was nothing she recognized but she took it anyway, its heft was good in her hand. Beyond that the false glitter of chrome, a fan crippled bladeless, she left it for a sullen slick of unwarped plastic that looked good from a distance but turned out to be nothing. Step and bend, step and bend, the red dirt of rust on her fraying work gloves, sun on her head and the back of her neck, burning, burning. Step and bend. She was there for over an hour before a guy on a hi-lo hollered her down and back to the office, where she haggled for her finds, paying more than she meant to for the nibbler-thing; its weight in the canvas bag banging hard against her hip, long legs in long strides, eyes big and dark and busy behind the black sunglasses: scanning the street, discards, you never knew where you might find something good.