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Fresh off a revolution and its fallout in his home country, the unnamed narrator of Cold Skin takes a job as a weather official on a small island off the coast of antarctic Chile. The job will give him the solitude he craves, allowing his mind to air out after all the blood and supposed glory. But when the steamship arrives at the island, something is wrong. The weather official he is to replace is gone, and the only other person on the island is the inhospitable and obviously insane Gruner, holed up in the lighthouse. This is what he wanted, after all: solitude. The ship leaves, and for a short while, our guy gets what he wants. But then night falls.
Cold Skin is a stylistic throwback; Piñol brings to mind a number of writers, but none of them have so much as lifted a pen in at least a lifetime. In the antarctic horror setting there’s a hint of H.G. Wells, and in the florid, pensive prose, Poe’s influence is clear. When the monsters do come—Piñol wastes little time on the foreboding—the horror is first rate and as thrilling as anything Lovecraft ever wrote. By the time the narrator realizes he must join forces with Gruner to survive, another, perhaps unexpected influence comes to bear: Joseph Conrad. Gruner is a Kurtz of sorts, a man whose principled madness is more an adaptation to his mad environment than a mental weakness.
Were Cold Skin only an accomplished throwback, we’d probably still recommend it. It’s just so much fun. But not long after Piñol has proven that he has the chops to thrill us, the story gets wonderfully complex and, despite its early-20th-century setting, rather modern. Piñol uses the narrator’s assumptions—ones very much like Conrad’s own cultural chauvinism—and somehow implicates the reader in them without ever being judgmental. One wishes all allegories were so delicate.—Pete Coco
