THE DEEP ONES: "The Skins" by Reggie Oliver

"The Skins" by Reggie Oliver

Discussion begins September 20, 2017.

First published in The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler & Other Strange Stories (2005).



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/the-skins/

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1085963

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler & Other Strange Stories
Dramas from the Depths
The Sea of Blood

MISCELLANY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reggie_Oliver
http://tartaruspress.com/ray/reggie-oliver-interview.html
http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-reggie-oliver/
https://www.sfsite.com/12a/ro405.htm
http://tinyurl.com/y9h3g5sy

Now that is an intriguing title. Love the artwork, especially "OMEGA" presumably in place of the DECCA recording label.

Wow, I've got all of the "selected print versions" for this selection. That's got to be a first.

I'll read this in The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler & Other Strange Stories (it's the Tartarus Press paperback reprint, not the ultra-rare original).

I'm not much familiar with Oliver's work, but I liked this one. The rather dreary variety show was really nicely evoked. Peggy's fate was macabre and yet the horror of the moment isn't without a certain amount of very dark humor. I liked how she kept smoking, no matter what. I wonder if that final scene of horror-most-fowl was deliberately intended by Oliver to reference the final image in Tod Browning's FREAKS?

I found the ending something of a let-down. Peggy's fate is indeed both grim and darkly amusing, but it lacks the weird aspect of the apparent haunting of the Dobbin costume.

Said haunting interestingly happens before Syd's death, so his ghost isn't responsible (unless we invoke postmortem time travel, I guess). Astral projection?

(I almost wrote "austral projection", which presumably is the mechanism behind the mirage of the intact Elder Thing city in AtMoM.)

BTW, if anyone else missed the significance of Mick's work and t-shirt, I just learnt that the London Palladium is, in WP's words, "arguably the most famous theatre in London and the United Kingdom, especially for musical variety shows."

I found the outre elements sort of random, not quite aligning with or against any of the characters in particular. I liked the descriptions, the evocations of setting and character, but felt like the plot was a little lacking. Mind you, I can enjoy and even prize stories that are virtually plotless, but this one was told as if it were really going somewhere.

Agree with everyone here, though perhaps the lack of plot / small-bang ending didn't disappoint me quite as much. I found the pacing quite good, and this both helped nurture the unease of the story as well as suggest it was going somewhere more dramatic than it ended up going. The scene in Syd's hospital room is a good example: they talk, there's something going on inside Syd (perhaps physically as well as temperamentally), we're just beginning to get a handle on it and suddenly ... a twitch under the covers, and our narrator is out the door, the scene ends.

I'm put in mind of M.R. James -- not in style but in approach. It's as if they both have a central idea, it's not a big one and it's usually a scene or incident more than a plot. They set up a story to hint at it, the main thing is addressed directly once and quite briefly, and then we're on to a short passage that extends the weirdness of the main thing a little longer, leaving it with us. Not like the face punch of Poe, he tends to leave us on that central thing, end the story with a dramatic confrontation of that main thing, which for me often falls a little flat.

To me, the "main thing" in this story is the idea of a merger of a person and the skins. Whether that's via astral projection, or the skins are somehow their own creature taking over, or something else, for me it comes down to that. Body horror, of a sort.

The prose is also top notch, scarcely a mis-step I thought. I would definitely read another story of Oliver's.

>7 paradoxosalpha: The prose is also top notch, scarcely a mis-step I thought. I would definitely read another story of Oliver's.

Agreed.

>5 AndreasJ: Peggy's fate is indeed both grim and darkly amusing, but it lacks the weird aspect of the apparent haunting of the Dobbin costume.

I suppose that depends on how you interpret her situation. If she's just sitting in a Priscilla suit, yeah, more sad and odd than weird. However, I read it as a merger of the skin with Peggy's body. It's not so much she "won’t move out of the skins now", she can't. The Alien facehugger has gone full body absorption.

>10 elenchus:

If there's anything to suggest she's not simply wearing the suit at the end, I missed it (and surely Mick's choice of modal implies she could remove it if she wanted to). I took it that she got so obsessed with the rôle she ended up wearing the suit always.

For me, the way the last few lines were phrased gave a suggestion:

In the midst of this in an armchair sat Peggy, her face white and shrivelled, the air and blood sucked out of her. She was smoking hard. From time to time she gave a convulsive twitch as if she were trying to shake off the loose robe of flesh which still clung to her bones.

So, something sucked out the air and blood; maybe that's the cancer (if there is actually). There's that convulsive twitch again suggesting the skins are moving of their own accord, as the horse leg did in the dressing room. But I admit, just hints, nothing definitive.

>12 elenchus:

Having the air and blood sucked out of her fits perfectly with cancer, but good catch on the twitch. Whether we're meant to surmise she's physically as well as emotionally attached to the suit, the parallel is surely intentional.

At first, I thought that Peggy was being assimilated body-horror style into the Priscilla skin, but now I think maybe not. What exactly does Syd mean in the hospital when he says "Well, she won’t do no Priscilla. Understand? I’m seeing to that. Peggy and I do the skins together or we don’t do it at all." How exactly was he "seeing" to it? Then something twitches under the bed sheet, which is mirrored later on in the skin lying on the backstage floor at Peggy's feet. What assaults the narrator inside the Dobbin costume? Perhaps the Dobbin suit is somehow supernaturally "reserved" for Syd and Peggy only and at the finish she really is reduced to merely being a grotesque caricature in the Priscilla suit.

The relationship between Peggy and Syd has me stumped, generally. Earlier in the story there were hints that their skins performance depended upon more than their professional acumen. I anticipated learning more, but we didn't. I took it as another vague hint at the malevolent agency in the skins themselves.

The sudden report of Syd's demise is another example of the pacing I mentioned earlier, effective for ratcheting up the unease but contributing little to my understanding of just what he's about. I even wonder if his drunken accident was motivated by more than marital strife or the standard post-performance celebration: had his situation with the skins reached a tipping point?

How's this: Syd was very possessive. He stepped in front of a car with the intention of killing himself. He refused amputation so that he effectively did manage to kill himself. Even before he was declared medically dead his spirit, or whatever, had begun to inhabit the pantomime horse skin. Both the narrator and Peggy felt it when they were on stage - and it animated the skin making it twitch - beforehand.

There's an ambiguity about the ending. We are told that Peggy's dying of cancer and the narrator sees her, grotesquely, dressed in the Mother Goose costume. This could be an uncanny, horrible, even blackly comic, but naturalistic scene. But there are a couple of hints that something more could be happening - the apparently supernatural events of the pantomime, Syd's threats, the son's parting words which could carry an unintendedly ironic double meaning - could Syd's spirit not only be inhabiting the horse skin but also draining Peggy's spirit into it, so they will be together forever?

By chance, I saw a comment online at the weekend that it takes two bullets to kill a pantomime horse. doesn't it follow that it takes two souls to haunt one?

I'll also mention that I've had the good luck(?) to be in the audience for the kind of pantomime and summer season end-of-the pier variety shows that Oliver describes, back in the '70s.

I've also been to the London Palladium at least once (another Elvis - Costello. Around the time of "Spiked").

I liked the story, but I admit the ending puzzled me.

I took the line "I noticed that where she ought to have had shoes there were great orange webbed feet." literally. Her feet are no longer human.

So what to make of that?

My preliminary questions: Peggy finally gets, after Syd’s death, to play Priscilla? She’s wearing the costume as she dies of cancer. Or has she become sort of possessed by the dream of what she always wanted or the spirit of Priscilla as the Pantomime Horse act seems to have a spirit as the narrator finds out when he becomes an interloper filling in for Syd? Did Syd project his spirit into the horse when the narrator was in it? Was some sort of psychic bond (and support system for Peggy) dissolved upon Syd’s death and then Peggy becomes possessed by the role she always wanted?

I think >16 housefulofpaper: has a good theory synthesizing most of the story. But I still wonder about those feet.

The Nightmare Magazine interview with Oliver is interesting. He talks about his tendency to combine the absurd and sympathetic in his characters. Here, that's Peggy. That was writing advice given him by his aunt Stella Gibbons, author of Cold Comfort Farm.

Good points and questions. I like the reading in >16 housefulofpaper:, but it leaves open just why Syd wants to suicide. The rest fits well with what we see in the story, but ... why?

I also took the point about webbed feet literally: the hint it was not Peggy despondent and clinically depressed, but physically transformed.

Not only the Nightmare interview but other links are very interesting. I've been looking for another online Oliver story to nominate but haven't found one. Might nominate something anyway.

Nominate away. I see that Tartarus Press has kindle versions now of his collections. I've only read a bit of Oliver but like what I've read.

I saw the skins as a metaphor for an over-close, jealous, strangling relationship. The narrator tells us how claustrophobic he found them, and one can well imagine.... In Syd's mind, Peggy belongs in the skins with him, not with anyone else, and not on her own either. You could see the whole plot from Syd's 'accident' on as his revenge on Peggy for her desire to escape, which she's never going to do. Domestic geese usually have their wings clipped.

I loved the contrast between Syd and Peggy's 'two smiling heads' popping round the door and making the narrator laugh, and the grim ending.

I enjoyed the manner in which multiple explanatory possibilities, whether psychological, supernatural or simply mundane, aren't necessarily exclusive of each other. The same kind of authorial playfulness can be found in the work of Robert Aickman.

Yes, absolutely.