Book Review: The Ill-Fitting Skin by Shannon Robinson
A great debut collection of dark and surreal feminist stories.
Shannon Robinson’s debut hooked me from the title. The Ill-Fitting Skin sounds like the possible title of a fairy tale, a horror story, or literally a story about discomfort with one’s being. While there’s no story with same title as the book, it’s a great, succinct summation of the stories that fall under all three categories, often more than one.
The collection begins with “Origin Story.” A mother and father discover their child is a werewolf. The condition is treated like a severe behavioral problem. The boy lashes out and causes serious issues for the boy and his parents. Eventually, the boy accidentally bites his mother, passing his werewolf disease to her.
The story takes werewolf tropes in a unique direction, while ultimately telling the story of parents, the mother especially, doing everything she can to raise a boy with an unusual condition. The result is touching and heartbreaking.
“The Rabbits” is another story about motherhood, though it goes in a much stranger direction. A woman, living in 18th-century England, finds she has the ability to give birth to live rabbits. A doctor investigates her to learn the source of the strange power.
This story is clearly based on the real historical figure, Mary Toft. Toft’s giving birth to rabbits was found to be a hoax, done by shoving rabbits inside of herself in order to “birth” them.
Robinson’s story, however, takes a sympathetic view of the subject. While it’s left up in the air if she’s really birthing rabbits, she’s certainly convinced she is, and has no memory of putting them inside herself. Though the medical establishment dismisses her as a lying, delusional woman, and she caves and agrees to prevent her punishment from being any more severe. In her jail cell, she contemplates giving birth to something else. Something far more terrible than rabbits.
“A Doom of Her Own” is the most formally experimental of the collection, written in the form of a Choose Your Own Adventure story. Its plot is the coming age tale of the protagonist, changing depending on the choices the reader makes regarding their relationships and their career.
Some of the choices lead you around in endless circles. Some of the choices lead to abstract scenes of how the protagonist is handling their decisions. Others are uncomfortably real, such a choice to end a relationship due to infidelity or stay in it and look the other way. There are even pages that seem to be the voice of a parent, or some kind of Superego, demanding the reader make a specific choice when given the option.
This is easily the most fascinating story in the collection. One could easily get lost in this story attempting to read it fully. It also includes what I believe is some of the best prose in the book.
“You Are Now in a Dark Chamber” is a more realistic and straightforward story. It takes place in the 1980s and is about a young girl joining a Dungeons and Dragons group that’s all boys. While she plays the game well, the boys, stuck in their ways, can’t bring themselves to keep a girl as part of the group. They conspire kill her character off in a brutal and mean-spirited way, which drives her from the group.
This is one of the obvious stories in terms of its commentary on gender, but the verisimilitude of the young boys in their “girls are icky” phase and the girl’s disappointment in trying to befriend them make it an enjoyable, if sad little slice of life.
“Charybdis” is probably the funniest story. A woman recounts an unpleasant sexual encounter she had with a man with a micropenis. She recalls how he became over attached after, acting like a borderline stalker. She mocks him, but feels some sense of empathy, wondering how his relationships after worked out. She also engages in self-deprecation by nicknaming her own genitalia after a sea creature from Greek mythology with a gaping maw.
Shannon Robinson’s debut collection of stories are funny, heartbreaking, fascinating, and terrifying. They comment on the roles foisted on women in society in unique and insightful ways. Her work reminds me very much of Shirley Jackson with her mix of horror and literary fiction.