is this frostbite or a self-inflicted injury
are the kinds of thoughts that our protagonist ponders
Fiction, 2002
It’s too hot for early March. To combat this, I have two solutions, one more replicable than the other: 1. Pack up everything and embark on a road trip to the hills. 2. Read a novel set in Antarctica that features an impenetrable landscape as one of its central characters. Though I replicated both options, you are a creature with free will (?) who can decide to do either or none.
I picked up Cold Skin on a whim. It was on the bottom shelf of a random section of the library, and the idea of an adventure-filled survivalist story appealed to me in the middle of midterm week. I honestly had no clue what I was getting into. To help you navigate these icy waters, here is a more accurate description: an insufferable Robinson Crusoe perches on an ice shelf where he encounters strange seal-like monsters who haunt him while he slowly loses his sanity to the swirl of a snowstorm. Apart from being absolutely bizarre (the perfect antidote for a brain melting under the sweltering sun), it’s a tale about the inherent right of ownership—and the subsequent questions of “over what, and why?”—that lodged itself into human minds.
As a reader, I was disgusted by the main character’s actions, specifically his brutal violence and profound selfishness—this is the real horror of the novel. But this fundamental discord between the person I was reading about and I made for a dialectic conversation, full of opposition and dialogue, resulting in a story that, in my mind, grows more robust than the mere words on the page I read.
Film - The Lighthouse
Song - Blood Bank