![]() ![]() ![]() Is Billy the next to suffer? He proceeds to track down Dirk and Shane, the other erstwhile teenage punks who are now a corrupt preacher and dirty cop, respectively. Theo’s death, we discover, is likely linked to the murder he and the rest of Billy’s cohort committed over 25 years before. I was prepared to do whatever was necessary to get them, including kicking the shit out of Theo.” But when Billy returns, he can’t make it past the police tape: Theo has been murdered, his death “a tipping point after which there was no place else to go except down into my own personal inferno.” White-knuckling his professionalism, Billy knows he must show restraint if he’s going to get any further intel out of Theo about Terry’s whereabouts. ![]() When Billy challenges his morality, Theo accuses him of harboring “bourgeois values, man.” I came to the conclusion he has two sides to him.” Billy makes the trek to confront Theo, whom he finds lounging like the Dude in Venice Beach, “reek of marijuana, sour milk, and cheap wine”: characteristics that make him the most repellent of free spirits. Cassie tells Billy: “hen Terry was around fourteen, I had this feeling he was messing around with her. He must also come to terms with the fact that she then married - and is now estranged from - one of their old homicidal friends, Theo, who is the prime suspect in Terry’s disappearance. Victimized by time and circumstance, Billy is compelled to take Cassie’s word that he impregnated her that fateful night 18 years before. It’s Cassie, who has now stalked him, requesting a cumbersome favor with multiple inconvenient reveals: her daughter Terry is missing, she wants Billy (an investigative reporter) to help her find the girl, and Terry happens to be Billy’s daughter, too. Like, you know, if things don’t work out with the doctor all you have to do is ask, no strings attached” - a classic foreshadowing that leaves us hanging until, 18 years later, Billy hears a knock on his door. Billy seals his fate further: “If there’s anything I can ever do for you, all you have to do is ask. One thing leads to another, and the two finally consummate their stillborn nostalgia. So, he begins to stalk her: discovering that she works as a bank teller, he poses as a customer. Seven years later, when he learns that Cassie has moved away and is now engaged to a doctor, he’s reluctantly affected further, and his feelings for her are inconveniently rekindled, intertwined with the compulsion to discuss the murder they witnessed together. Though he wasn’t directly involved in the killing, his culpability is an intrusive thought he can’t stop entertaining. The incident prompts the friends to disband, purposely losing touch to assure the crime’s secrecy.īilly remains the most rattled of the group. Billy and Cassie are witnesses to the killing, and they leave the scene with vivid images that will haunt them for the next decade. “I made sure I was at her side, brushing against her whenever possible.” While a clumsy attempt at courtship, it saves him from being swept into the undertow of the other boys’ escalations, culminating when they beat a homeless man to death, assuming he’s a murderer the cops are after. Billy is the mildest of his group of idle-handed teens, establishing himself as “more an observer rather than participant” in the “horseplay” of Dirk, Shane, and Theo, a group convinced after one beer apiece that “they were drunk enough to take on the whole world.” For his part, Billy is hot for Cassie, their gorgeous tomboy tagalong. The era-spanning novel begins innocently enough in the 1960s, and while Pasadena isn’t exactly known for its mean streets, Haut’s depiction of Billy’s wayward youth is a searing example of guilt by association. The more I read every waffling, pragmatic, devil’s-advocate thought Billy had, the less my imagination could ignite and assist the slow-burning mystery that Haut has constructed Skin Flick was an otherwise riveting narrative that was hard to put down. WE’VE ALL MISTAKEN overexposure for intimacy, but after traversing three decades with haunted journalist Billy, the protagonist of Woody Haut’s new novel Skin Flick, I’m worried that the reason I felt so close to him was solely because he wouldn’t stop talking the whole time. ![]()
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