The Skin Team - A Novel - PDF

There's been a fire at the Power Company Building. A vomit of lightbulbs. A compass recovered from the stomach, pointing to True North. Teams of boys in the woods get lost and forget their colors. Girls gather in the park, trying to remember what songs to sing. But the horses are too sick to bet on and a map is not the territory. Three skins convulse, three bodies converge. A sickness is shared between a girl and a boy and a boy and a river. Jordaan Mason's debut novel, The Skin Team, is a story of mesmerized violence and the shape shifting between love and sex and the singing that happens when the power goes out.

Jordaan Mason is a filmmaker, musician, and writer. Their writing has appeared in UNSAID, The Scrambler, Everyday Genius, NOÖ Journal, and red lightbulbs. They live in Toronto with their husband and their cats.

Cover art and design by Tarsila Stoeckicht

Second edition from Magic Helicopter Press. The book is currently out of print, so this is a PDF version only.

"Reading The Skin Team, you would never suspect how difficult it is to write even fairly about such things, much less with Jordaan Mason's radiant emotional grace and super-deft detailing and flawless style. This novel is something very rare, and it's about as beautiful as fiction can ever be." — Dennis Cooper

"The Skin Team is a novel for poets, to be read as much for the language as for the plot, to be untangled." — Jeremy Behreandt at Heavy Feather Review

"A psychedelic, haunting, genuinely queer experience of adolescence." — Jonathan Valelly at Xtra!

"The Skin Team brims with flesh made electricity, of sick bodies warped by technology into health. It’s a book of sex but not exactly about sex. It seamlessly engages with how atoms and bits are not entirely different, how they mix with each other and mold our selves in surprising ways." — Drew Kalbach at Actuary Lit

"There is certainly a sense of the Lynchian, as well as the novels of Dennis Cooper, carried in sentences that together feel close to the same long slow gravity you might have felt exploring a strange relative’s house as a child, expecting on any wall to find a button that would open up into a larger, hidden room." — Blake Butler at VICE

"Like William T. Vollmann, Mason tears apart familiar relationships and conflicts to illuminate them in some newfound fashion .. [Mason's] characters’ revolutions occur in unexpected ways; they delve deep inside themselves, burrowing somewhere deep inside, seeking both self-knowledge and self-abnegation." — Tobias Carroll at Vol. 1 Brooklyn

"With careful stitch-work behind this literary coming-of-age hybrid, Mason has also given the reader a subtle study of impermanence and how our memories wane despite our best attempts to preserve them. " — Mel Bosworth at The Small Press Book Review

"Though the subject of chronology is interestingly enough discussed in the narrative, the story itself is not linearly told. In these ways, each short passage often works as its own prose poem. And like poetry, which sometimes implies what can't be literally described, Mason manages to suggest a story of experience in these pages that are mystical and memorable at the same time." — Denton Loving at PANK