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Skinner Luce

Skinner Luce

by Patricia Ward
     
 

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“Skinner was what servs called each other. It was because they were fake, their skins a disguise…”

Every year when the deep cold of winter sets in, unbeknownst to humanity, dangerous visitors arrive from another world. Disguised as humans, the Nafikh move among us in secret, hungry for tastes of this existence. Their fickle, often-violent

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Overview


“Skinner was what servs called each other. It was because they were fake, their skins a disguise…”

Every year when the deep cold of winter sets in, unbeknownst to humanity, dangerous visitors arrive from another world. Disguised as humans, the Nafikh move among us in secret, hungry for tastes of this existence. Their fickle, often-violent needs must be accommodated at all times, and the price of keeping them satisfied is paid most heavily by servs.

Created by the Nafikh to attend their every whim, servs are physically indistinguishable from humans but for the Source, the painful, white-hot energy that both animates and enslaves them. Destined to live in pain, unable to escape their bondage, servs dwell in a bleak underworld where life is brutal and short.

Lucy is a serv who arrived as a baby and by chance was adopted by humans. She’s an outcast among outcasts, struggling to find a place where she truly belongs. For years she has been walking a tightrope, balancing between the horrors of her serv existence and the ordinary life she desperately longs to maintain; her human family unaware of her darkest secrets.

But when the body of a serv child turns up and Lucy is implicated in the gruesome death, the worlds she’s tried so hard to keep separate collide. Hounded by the police, turned upon by the servs who once held her dear, she must protect her family and the life she’s made for herself.

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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
11/16/2015
Lucy Hennessey grew up thinking she was a normal human being. She learned the hard way that she is a serv, created by the Nafikh, an alien race, to serve them in any capacity whenever they visit Earth. If she lives long enough to meet her service quota, she can be freed; having experienced a normal life, she now sometimes dares to dream what she might do with that freedom. But everything begins to fall apart, and her grim serv world crashes against that of her human family’s when she is linked to the death of a child serv and encounters a tenacious human wielding an uncanny knowledge of the Nafikh (who are otherwise a well-kept secret). Running away is useless, and it seems that the only way for Lucy to save herself and her family is to plunge deeper into the Nafikh’s world. Ward (The Bullet Collection) delivers a gut-punching novel, consistently taut and bleak. Readers will feel Lucy hanging on by her fingernails just beneath the human world and bloodied by every hard climb upward as she tries straddling two lives while fitting into neither. Agent: Matt Bialer, Sanford J. Greenburger Associates. (Jan.)
From the Publisher

“A gut-punching novel, consistently taut and bleak. Readers will feel Lucy hanging on by her fingernails just beneath the human world and bloodied by every hard climb upward.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Ward's prose is expressive and often unexpectedly beautiful. . .High-caliber, often engrossing literary sci-fi.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“A masterly written slowburner... Skinner Luce is a dark and beautiful dystopian hallucination that will keep you simultaneously cringing and wanting more. Lucy glows like an ember of rage and strength in search of personal liberation and redemption.”
—Seb Doubinsky, author of Song of Synth and Goodbye Babylon

“A darkly clever concept with an oppressive atmosphere that never lets up.”
—Kit Whitfield, author of Benighted and In Great Waters

Kirkus Reviews
2015-11-05
Ward (The Bullet Collection, 2003) offers a tale of a woman discovering her alien origins. On modern-day Earth, a race of powerful aliens known as the Nafikh disguise themselves as human in order to walk among us. But they're a dangerous and often violent lot, so they created a race of Servs, servants who appear completely human, to help clean up their messes. Servs are "dropped" on Earth by their Nafikh masters, often at young ages, and spend their existence living—and very frequently dying—at the whims of their powerful alien overlords. A Serv named Lucy was sent to Earth as a baby, but she was mistaken for a foundling and raised by adoptive human parents. After an anguished childhood feeling like she never fit in, Lucy discovers what she truly is and enters into life as a Serv, although she doesn't quite fit in there, either. She does her best to keep her Serv and human lives separate, but when she's implicated in the death of a Serv child, it looks as though everything will fall apart. Although the plot begins slowly and drifts a bit in the book's first third, once the pace picks up it quickly becomes an absorbing read. The full details of the Nafikh aliens are never completely explained; readers only ever know as much as Lucy knows, which some may find a little frustrating. But Ward's prose is expressive and often unexpectedly beautiful—in one instance, she describes an elderly woman as having "the unmistakable odor of a body collapsing." Lucy's adoptive mother and cousin are especially well-rendered, not just as real human beings, but as people who've been particularly shaped by the environment they live in. Ultimately, though, a plot development at the story's climax leads to a rather dissatisfying ending and keeps the book from being truly exceptional. High-caliber, often engrossing literary sci-fi.

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Product Details

ISBN-13:
9781940456355
Publisher:
Talos
Publication date:
01/12/2016
Pages:
352
Product dimensions:
5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)