Break the Skin

April 25, 2011
An uncomfortably close friendship torn apart by jealousy lies at the center of Martin's provocative new novel. When Laney Volk, a high school dropout, goes to work at Wal-Mart, she meets beautiful, stubborn Delilah Dade and dark, sinister Rose MacAdow, both almost twice her age. Delilah invites Laney to live with her and, despite the generation gap, they become very close, eventually sharing their bond with Rose. But Delilah and Rose's friendship unravels when they pursue the same man, a musician called Tweet. When Delilah suspects that Rose may have cast a satanic spell on her, she and Laney start messing around with guns, with help from Laney's boyfriend, Lester. Meanwhile, several states away, a lonely, desperate tattoo artist going by "Miss Baby" takes in a man who is either suffering from amnesia or hiding from his past, and convinces him that he's her husband. Crackling with dark deeds and bad intentions, Martin (The Bright Forever, a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize) snakes through the lives of the desperate without casting pity. The naïve Laney, splitting narration duties with Miss Baby, has a sharp eye for detail even if she lacks the framework in which to assemble them.

April 15, 2011

A crime of passion, thought to be committed by a traumatized Vietnam veteran, links a lovesick Illinois girl with an equally needy young Mexican-American woman in Texas.

Laney, a shy and scrawny 19-year-old, works at a Wal-Mart in a small town in southeastern Illinois. She shares a trailer with two workmates: sultry Delilah, a perennially mistreated loser at love now approaching 40, and Rose, "a big woman with a big heart" suspected of practicing witchcraft. Things are looking up when Delilah, who packs a .38 Special, romantically targets a bar-band rocker named Tweet. But when Tweet takes up with Rose, all hell breaks loose. The Vietnam vet, for whom Laney falls, is Lester, Tweet's bow-legged, sweet-tempered roadie, who is so haunted by his killing of innocent civilians during the war that he enters fugue states of memory loss. One of them takes him to Denton, Tex., where Betty Ruiz, "Miss Baby," the owner of a tattoo shop, claims him off the street. She convinces him his name is Donnie True and they're a couple. They fall in love for real and plan their future together. But they, too, are engulfed by violence when her brother Pablo is punished for stealing money from Slam Dent, his partner in a cattle-stealing scheme. Told in flashback through the alternating voices of Laney and Miss Baby, the book overdoes its tattoo metaphor in evoking "lives festering just beneath the skin." But Martin, whose kidnap novel The Bright Forever (2005) was a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, expertly applies shades of James Cain–like noir to a modern story that might have been inspired by one of the Lucinda Williams songs on this book's soundtrack. Black magic, daughters cursed by the loss or absence of their fathers, post traumatic stress syndrome, small-town secrecy and lies, pre-teen voyeurism: Welcome to life "on the other side of right thinking."

An intoxicating small-town thriller that quickly gets under your skin.

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January 1, 2011

Disaffected teenager Laney has no one in the world but the older Delilah, whom she clings to like a raft. Then the police start asking Laney questions that link her to the sadder-but-wiser Miss Baby, who thinks she's finally found true love with a gentle man who can't remember his own name, and the story of a wrenching crime emerges. Martin has a following--he's won a passel of awards (e.g., Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction), and The Bright Forever was a Pulitzer finalist--so maybe Break the Skin will break him out.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.