Review by Booklist Review
Isserley is a very small woman with very large, perfect breasts and very thick glasses. She motors slowly about eastern Scotland above Edinburgh, picking up muscular male hitchhikers and, it seems, making them vanish. For its first third, Under the Skin is as suspenseful and creepy as the first third of Psycho. But while Hitchcock's harrowing film then disperses anxiety in a burst of violence, Faber relieves it only a little by starting to reveal what exactly is going on in his artful moral parable. Isserley is not what she seems, nor are any of her associates at Ablach Farm, where she is one of only two who ever leave or even live on its grounds. The others are underground. Where they all come from, resources are very scarce and the socioeconomic hierarchy very rigid, but expansive business doesn't let even the sky limit its operations. Faber's first novel smoothly morphs from a serial-murder thriller into an alien first-contact story concerned with the distinctions between humans and other species. What divides peers from prey--or perhaps the better term here is provender? That question bedevils Isserley; and her eventual answer, expressed in action, suggests that it is sympathy but that sympathy is probably futile. This is an sf or dark fantasy novel in the mode of Brave New World and Animal Farm, written as well and demonstrating, like them, how provocative genre conventions can be. --Ray Olson
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A strange woman named Isserley roams the Scottish Highlands in search of juicy, well-muscled hitchhikers in Faber's menacing but unfulfilling debut novel (after Some Rain Must Fall, a collection of short stories). The opening chapters are suffused with an almost palpable sense of dread: Isserley picks up one hitchhiker after another and engages them in conversation, measuring them against a set of criteria of which the reader, as yet, is unaware. Some of the men are discarded and some are kept; in the process the reader learns that Isserley herself is oddly shaped, with breasts too large, legs too short, and scars everywhere. Faber's pacing here is masterful, with clues precisely dropped and details ominously described. But once Faber reveals the reason Isserley is collecting the hitchhikers (and it's truly bizarre), the book turns from horror to allegory and begins to run out of steam. The central conceit of the allegory is repugnant, but also unimpressive; it feels like something animal rights extremists might have cooked up after watching Soylent Green. Faber possesses an undeniable gift for grotesque imagery ("He grinned so broadly it was like an incision slicing his head in two"), but his unsettling prose doesn't adequately flesh out the underdeveloped premise of the story. Still, the Dutch-born and Australian-raised Faber is a strange and promising new talent, and his next novel might better use the macabre skills he so unnervingly displays here. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The publisher reports that there is lots of excitement about this quirky little import from Scotland, whose heroine--tiny, birdlike Isserley, who wears incredibly thick glasses and has a knock-out figure--picks up for mysterious reasons of her own hitchhikers with big muscles and interesting family stories. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An eerie debut novel from Faber, Dutch-born, turns the Scottish Highlands into a landscape from The Twilight Zone as Scotland's brawny best meet their match in the diminutive Isserly, who takes many of them on a short ride from which there's no return. Isserly is like a woman possessed as day after day she cruises back and forth on the Highland highways on the lookout for male hitchhikers with big thighs and broad chests. Once she finds one, she gives him a lift and immediately puts him at ease by placing her own ample chest on display. The whole of her is strange--dwarflike, heavily scarred, Coke-bottle glasses--but the huge breasts are what hold the eye of her passenger, keeping him transfixed while she engages him in conversation. If the talk goes in one direction, Isserly lets her man go, but if she gets the answers she seeks, her breath grows shallow, her heart races, and she flips the switch that will drug the man through his seat, incapacitating him long enough for her to drive him back to her remote farmhouse, where he will undergo an experience outdoing his worst nightmare. Isserly, it turns out, is a procurer from another planet whose job--for which she's been surgically altered in a way that leaves her in constant pain--is simply, well, to bring home the bacon. But she has fallen in love with this world of sea and snow so unlike her own, and when a handsome visitor from her world arrives to remind her that in spite of her mutilation her feelings are not dead, she realizes she's no longer able to do her job. The process of procurement is duly horrific, but the procurer's transformation from ruthless to compassionate, even with the conventional budding-romance twist, provides a more compelling dimension--and it's enhanced by the superbly evoked imagery of the Highlands. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
