Skin Flick by Woody Haut – Review

A group of young friends are enjoying a carefree night in Pasadena in the early 1960s when suddenly their pleasant evening is interrupted by a large police presence on the streets. While ushering the teens away, an overly talkative police officer reveals that a woman has been murdered and the suspect is loose in the area. This fires the teens’ adolescent imaginations. Sure enough, they soon discover a man cowering behind a trash can down an alleyway. Assuming him to be the murderer, they savagely assault the man and crush his head with a rock, leaving him for dead.

This horrific event will define the lives of everyone involved, from the active participants to those that looked on unable or unwilling to stop it. As two decades pass, the friends drift apart, taking different paths in life: one becomes a cop, another a preacher and the main protagonist Billy, a modestly successful freelance journalist.

One day, Billy is contacted by Cassie, an old girlfriend. She wants him to use his investigative skills to help locate her teenage daughter who has suddenly vanished. Billy is hesitant at first, but he agrees to help for old times’ sake. After all, he’s had periodic romantic entanglements with Cassie and suspects he may actually be the father of the girl. As with the best noir tales, what begins as a somewhat reluctant assignment spirals into an all-consuming obsession. Billy is forced to confront the friends he was with the night a man was beaten to death twenty years earlier. He interviews Cassie’s ex-husband, a deadbeat poet who tacitly admits that he abused the missing girl. He interviews his friend who became a fire and brimstone (and sexually confused) preacher. He tries to recruit the support of his old pal who has become a terse, cynical cop. His passion for Cassie is reignited, even though she has become a ruthless businesswoman cashing in on the 80s property boom and embodies everything Billy detests about Reaganomics. Before he can judge his friends though, Billy is about to descend into his own personal hell. A nightmare from which it is far from certain that he will ever emerge.

I am sent copies of many newly published books… more than I’ll ever have chance to read, let alone review. But when a copy of Skin Flick arrived, and I saw it was the latest novel by Woody Haut, I knew it was going to be a book I would devour. I read it in two sittings. Would have finished it in one, were it not for the inconvenient fact that I had to go to work. Woody is a bona fide noir expert who has written several seminal works on the genre. His previous novels Cry For a Nickel, Die For a Dime and Days of Smoke were both superb. I’ve known Woody for several years as he was the guest speaker at the James Ellroy: Visions of Noir conference I organised at the University of Liverpool. In fact, there are strong parallels between Skin Flick and elements of Ellroy’s work. The fatal assault on the man hiding behind a trashcan reminded me of Ellroy’s Blood on the Moon, in which a horrifically violent event between adolescent youths reverberates through the decades, with equally violent results, for all of the main characters. But the stronger influence here is probably David Goodis, in that Haut doesn’t need a detective protagonist to unravel this tale of intrigue. Prepare to be sucked into Billy’s first-person narration as he recounts, in a form of noir poetry, the emotionally desolate landscape of eighties America and the fatalistic lives of the characters trapped in it.

Skin Flick is a modern noir classic.