The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley (Book Review, 2018)
content warning: mental wellness, death by suicide, body horror, gore, surgical/medical situations, child endangerment/exploitation, drug abuse
Quick editorial note: The Loosening Skin is a British novel with British spelling and grammar. I chose to stick with the spelling of “moult” used in the book, rather than the American spelling of “molt” without the u.
Part of what draws me to weird fiction as a reader and an author is the freedom. You get to dip your toes into a little horror, a little fantasy, a little sci-fi, maybe even some western, noir, comedy, detective—whatever you want, really. The possibilities are limitless as the only consistent rule is that something is off from the real world. This can be a full alternate universe lurking beneath the surface like in the works of writers like China Miéville or David Wong. It could also be just a little different from the universe we expect like in the works of Katherine Dunn or Poppy Z. Brite. The experimentation with genre, setting, and character is just as important as the actual storytelling.
The Loosening Skin is the kind of weird fiction I’m drawn to. Aliya Whiteley’s prose gives you just enough detail about the world of the story to imagine what it looks like. If she spends the time to describe what a particular fish tank looks like or the precise location of a scar on a body, it’s critical to understanding the story. The rest is left to your imagination.
The Loosening Skin takes place in an alternate reality with two key differences from our own world: neither the human form nor love can last forever. In this world, humans moult their skin every few years once they hit their mid-teens. This changes your appearance and your relationship with the world. Love is a sensation stored in the skin that dies with the moult. You can feel its physical presence in the fallen skin, but you won’t experience the actual emotion after the moult. In a best case scenario, you might still remain friends with the people you once loved; in a worst case scenario, children are abandoned when their mother and father both moult and no longer have any connection to their own families.
Rose is a bodyguard for one of the most famous actors in the world. She also has the misfortune of living with a chronic illness connected to the moult. She sheds her skin at a greatly accelerated rate. Her moult is more severe, as all of her connections to other people are lost with the skin unless she fights to maintain a connection to those lives. New interests are common with the moult; choosing to change jobs, homes, and lives every moult is not.
This book broke me in the best ways possible. Whiteley creates an ominous world where the stuff of extreme body horror is an accepted and natural process of humanity. Sure, a teenager might be upset the first time they moult, but everyone knows it will happen eventually. You can even feel it coming on soon enough to take time off work and set yourself up for a smooth transition into your new life and form.
Do we know exactly what the process looks like? Nope. That’s what’s so terrifying. How I envision the moult is different than how you will envision the moult. We know people feel itchy while it happens and the new skin is super smooth and squishy until it settles in. Ideal moults will result in a skin suit that can be stored or displayed with proper conservation for years to come.
The world gets weirder. Rose has lived many lives. For years, she investigated the black market trade connected to the moult. Again, we don’t get to see many of the details directly, but we do hear stories about trafficking, illegal trade, and even child endangerment driven by…well, that’s never specified either. The moulted skin has value we’re never allowed to fully understand.
The Loosening Skin is the kind of weird fiction that hinges on suggestion and character development, not sensory detail and plot. There is a rich story and world to explore. It’s just told entirely out of time, jumping to different years chapter by chapter to explore Rose’s psychological reaction to the moult. Everything does tie together in brilliant and unexpected ways by the end of the novel. You just have to be willing to put the work in to fill in all the missing pieces and connect the dots.
I’m not sure which of the two rules of the universe is ultimately more terrifying: the moult or the love. The idea of everyone just accepting that they’ll shed their skin like a snake every few years and keep going is unsettling body horror. Whiteley goes much further as the story progresses. You can imagine that a story about a celebrity bodyguard protecting an actor is going to feature many attempts to derail the moulting process the same way cosmetic surgery and medication are used to fight aging in our own world.
However, the concept of love as a purely physical sensation that can disappear overnight and never be reclaimed is maddening. Replace love with an alien technology and you’ll begin to understand how confused every character in this world is by all the different kinds of love we take for granted in our day to day lives. This is a world where no relationship can last forever because of human evolution and biology. People will shed all the love they feel as sure as the sun will rise in the morning.
The Loosening Skin is the kind of weird fiction text I’ll be grappling with for a long time. I’m excited to revisit it and start pulling it apart to understand how Whiteley accomplishes so much in this style. I need to understand the how not just of story but of her technique as an author. I can tell you all about the interior design choices of the celebrity client and nothing about what he looks like besides “handsome.” I can tell you how people fall out of love but not how they fall in love. There are layers of unresolved mystery that come down to your interpretation of a time-jumping character portrait of a woman experiencing a more extreme version of the moult that every person on earth lives with.
The Loosening Skin is available in paperback and eBook formats.
