At forty-seven, Mr. F’s working life on London’s Skin Lane is one governed by calm, precision, and routine. So when he starts to have recurring nightmares, he does his best to ignore them. The images that appear in his dreams are disturbing—Mr. F can’t think of where they have come from. After all, he’s an ordinary middle-aged man.
As London’s backstreets begin to swelter in the long, hot summer of 1967, Mr. F’s nightmares become an obsession. A chance encounter adds a face to the body that nightly haunts him, and the torments of his restless nights lead him—and the reader—deeper into a terrifying labyrinth of rage, desire, and shame.
Part fairy-tale, part compelling evocation of a now-lost London, this is Neil Bartlett’s fiercest piece of writing yet: cruel, erotic, and tender.
Review
Repressed sexuality is taken to spooky new heights in British novelist Bartlett’s first novel in more than a decade. Mr. F is a lonely 47-year-old bachelor - his only sex has been with female prostitutes - whose days are governed by routine. He is up at the same time every morning, catches buses and trains like clockwork, and has wielded sharp knives in the same job for more than 30 years: he’s a fur-skinner, master of a dying art in London’s Skin Lane of 1967. Normalcy first becomes skewed when Mr. F starts waking in a sweat from tormenting sexual dreams inhabited by a faceless, muscular young man. Next, daily life merges with nighttime terrors when a handsome teenager is apprenticed to him – the dream figure becomes flesh and blood reality. Bartlett’s portrait of a desperate man obsessed by unattainable male beauty is fiendishly menacing and fiercely atmospheric, a relentless blend of erotic psychodrama and emotional self-destruction.
