Title: Skinners

Author: Craig Wesley Wall

Release date: August 3rd, 2017

A few weeks ago, I saw Craig post on IG that his novella ‘Skinners’ was currently free in anticipation of the sequel, ‘Skinners 2’ releasing in February. Now, if you’ve followed my reviews for any length of time, you’ll know I’m a huge fan of Craig’s works. His novel, ‘The Briar’ lives rent free in my head and his novel ‘You’ll Do As You’re Told’ was fantastic. I still have to read his ‘Invasive Species’ trilogy, which was recommended to me a while back by Edward Lorn. So, when Craig shared about book one and book two, I rushed to Amazon to grab book one and preorder book two. And, as so often happens, I discovered that I’d purchased book one way back in 2020. Sheesh.

Well, with book two arriving in a few weeks, I needed to fix the fact I’d not read the first, so I dove in, wondering what craziness Craig would deliver with this sci-fi/horror novella.

What I liked: How’s this for a set up? A community celebrates a meteorite shower by throwing a big party. Almost everyone is there to watch it. But then strange, glowing spores erupt from the space fragments and every person who comes into contact with them grows insane, massive worms within their bodies.

Awesome, right?!

The story follows low level thief, Steve (which I gotta say, I wasn’t too thrilled at that name choice, Mr. Author!), who – along with his girlfriend, Lisa – head to a convenience store to rob the place so they can buy more drugs. This takes place at the same time as the meteorite shower and while there, someone comes in, they erupt into a writhing mass of space worms and all hell breaks loose. The worms like to strip peoples skin from their bodies, eating it so they can grow more worms.

Steve, alongside retired military man, Thom – Thom with an H! – manage to survive and in the process connect with teen girl and her younger brother. The two youth were unaffected at the party.

From very early on, it’s evident that this book is a ‘who will survive’ story and for the most part, nobody is safe, nobody is ‘definitely going to make it,’ which I greatly appreciated.

As it progresses, we get some light background on a few of the characters, as well as a few new locations where the worms arrive and seek to slurp the skin off all who move and time and time again I had a huge grin on my face at just how fun this creature-feature was. It’s a throwback to the glorious B-Movie monster age that I grew up with, where movies like ‘Tremors’ kept me awake and had me equally entertained and terrified.

Now, considering this was released almost a decade before the sequel arrives, the ending can be seen as a definitive ‘ending’ in the sense that the story concludes, but considering the events in the sky and the fallout that would occur, there’s also no reason why this couldn’t have a follow up and having finished it, I’m excited that there will be.

What I didn’t like: There’s a whole sub-plot about acceptance that focuses on Steve, his past and working with Thom and I felt like it just didn’t get expanded upon enough to really make any waves. There’s not a lot of space in this one to really expand upon it, though potentially it might’ve happened if this would’ve been a novel, but considering the page count, it would’ve been nice to have seen just a bit more of that storyline to give it the emotional whump the ending could’ve gave us.

Why you should buy this: I’m a huge sucker for sci-fi/horror novellas and this was just a blast. Wesley Wall throws us faaaaaaar into the deep end immediately and from there it’s up to us to sink or swim. The creatures were great, the characters were formed just enough to make us care while also not bogging us down with significant backstory and the action moments were really well done.

This will be a single-sitting read for many people and with a follow up coming shortly, this is the perfect time to grab it and enjoy!