The Skin Market

von Kayla Ritchie

92 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

In the isolated village of Oakhaven, survival comes with a terrible price.Every autumn, the villagers suffer from the "Autumn Itch," a relentless condition that signals the coming of the Shedding. Their aging, damaged skin must be removed in a ritual of painful renewal, leaving behind a fresh layer that appears younger and cleaner. The villagers believe the process protects them from the Great Rot-a corruption that would otherwise consume them from within.But Elliot Vale has never shed.His skin is unnaturally smooth, poreless, cold, and almost synthetic. While everyone around him carries the visible marks of countless renewals, Elliot remains unchanged. The villagers see him as both a blessing and an abomination: a perfect example of what they hope to become, yet a disturbing reminder of everything they have lost. Even the High Curator, Julian Cross, cannot understand why Elliot's body refuses to participate in the sacred cycle.Elliot's greatest mystery is also the source of his deepest loneliness. Every Shedding strips away more than physical skin. Memories fray. Features change. Pieces of identity disappear. The villagers may look younger after the ritual, but each renewal costs them another fragment of the people they once were. The perfect faces they seek may conceal an increasingly empty existence.Then Elliot discovers what happens to the skin they discard.Beyond Oakhaven, the forest is filled with translucent sheets of abandoned flesh. Some hang from trees like forgotten garments. Others move. These discarded remains become Husks-faceless, hollow remnants of people who once lived in the village. They are not merely dead tissue. They remember.When Elliot encounters a Husk bearing the scar of Victor Storm, he begins to understand that the village's discarded identities have not disappeared at all. They have been accumulating in the woods, carrying fragments of memories and longing.Meanwhile, the annual ritual approaches. The villagers gather inside the House of Molt, where copper vats and chemical brines prepare them for another cycle of renewal. Elliot watches as the Elders transform the Shedding into a ritual of communal unmaking, stripping away layers of skin and, with them, pieces of memory.But Elliot is not simply another villager.He may be the vessel the discarded selves have been waiting for.As the boundary between the living and the abandoned dead collapses, Elliot begins receiving memories that do not belong to him. The emptiness that has defined his existence starts to fill with the lives of others. Eventually, his body reveals a mysterious golden seam, and a deeper identity begins to awaken within him-the "Original" beneath the manufactured perfection.The Skin Market is a disturbing gothic horror story about identity, memory, bodily transformation, and the price of trying to erase the past. In Oakhaven, people shed their skin to escape decay.But what happens when everything you throw away remembers who you were?

• Themen: Belletristik Horrorliteratur, Geistergeschichten und Übernatürliches Okkultes / Paranormaler Horror
• ISBN: 9798182775847
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 14.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Kayla Ritchie