A nice read. Cold Skin is a refreshing if somewhat disturbing venture into the highs and lows of utter and absolute loneliness. Two men. More alike than not stranded on an island in a remote part of the Antarctic hash out their loves, fears and hostility towards a world that seemingly does not want them. As if the horrors of isolation were not enough, Mother Nature decides to throw in her own two cents by besetting these men with attacks from strange creatures from the depths of a cold and gray ocean. How they react to each other, their visitors and their environment is only the start of their problems. Cold Skin is very well written and pieced together. The writer decided to keep the story short and keep it devoid of any filler. But with his writing style he could have made this book a thousand pages and it would have been just as good. I am willing to think that Pinol has stacks of unpublished sections that he either did not want in the story or was taken out by the editors. What a thrill that would be to read. Cold Skin is a highly recommended novel. The movie is excellent as well. ( )

Being a novella in which a man is dropped off by a tramp steamer at an island in the Southern Ocean to serve as a weather observer for a year, only to find that said island is infested with monsters and that the only other resident thereon, the lighthouse keeper, is a surly sociopath. The book has some roots in the horror genre, but for most of its length reminded me of a kooked out Swiss Family Robinson as the two characters dreamed up ever-new tactics and DIY weaponry to fortify their lighthouse redoubt against their otherworldly nemeses, but towards the end the book turns its attention a bit more toward the bigger topics of war and xenophobia. Didn't love it, didn't hate it. ( )

Easy to read without paying too much attention, and I did't find it scary at all… Which surprised (and disappointed?) me quite a lot thinking of all the other reviews on here. It's an interesting portrait of humans and the borders of humanity, with the beautiful setting of a tiny island somewhere where it's still warm enough to survive (if you find a way to handle certain dangers). The frogs are described rather aesthetically, too. The end had a severerly melancholic touch. ( )

An interesting, claustrophobic meditation on the cyclic nature of violence and madness. The book was meant to be an uncomfortable read, and yet I was put off by one part in particular -- the fact that the only female character was a sub-human creature, incapable of speech, who existed pretty much as a purely physical sexual object for the two male characters, and was in fact complicit in (and apparently mostly indifferent to) her own physical abuse and rape.

That being said, the whole point was watching a man descend into his own sort of de-personalized inhumanity, so maybe it's all one.

An interesting read, but probably nothing I'll ever read again. ( )

A resistance fighter trying to break away takes up a very lonely position, as a weather observer on a tiny island in the south Atlantic. But arriving on the island, there’s no trace of the person he’s meant to replace. The cabin is empty, seemingly left in a hurry. The only other building on the island is a lighthouse on the other side of it, under a different jurisdiction. The keeper seems deranged, a quiet, grumpy giant of a man, uninterested in company. Still, our narrator decides to stay, his pickup date a year later. Already the first night he finds himself in blackest horror. Out of the water come reptilian, monsterous creatures, bent on forcing their way into his cabin. The lighthouse is the only safe place on the island.

This is an incredibly classic horror tale. A small cast under siege by a nameless horror with nowhere to run, the brutal isolation, the dense psychological tension between them growing, evolving into another form of warfare, the dwindling resources… Piñol does a great job of bringing a story with rather few elements to life, in a way that feels more like Conrad than King. At times I’m biting my nails from the tension, and the pages fly by. It’s not original enough to warrant top marks in my book, but more than worth a read if you’re a fan of this kind of dense, concentrated chamber play. Be warned however, that our narrator is pretty damn unlikeable a lot of the time, if that kind of thing turns you off. ( )