BRAT

A man loses his skin, and possibly his sanity, in this bizarre debut.

Gabriel, the narrator of Smith’s novel, is having a rough time. As the book opens, the London man is in a doctor’s office; he thinks he might have a concussion after having been hit by his teenage nephew. The doctor gives him the all-clear for his head but notes he might have eczema. As it turns out, it’s something much weirder and much worse: Large pieces of skin begin to peel from his body. That’s not the only setback he’s facing—his girlfriend has abruptly moved out of their shared flat, and his father recently died, which Gabriel isn’t handling well. (It doesn’t help that he calls one of the mourners at the funeral a “stupid purple bitch.”) Gabriel moves to the house his parents shared—his mother is in a nursing home—in order to prep it for sale, but he doesn’t get much done except drink, smoke weed, and read mysteriously changing manuscripts left behind by his parents. He also encounters a mysterious boy and girl who he thinks might have a connection to his parents’ stories, along with a mysterious man with a deer face mask. This is a bizarre novel, but not in a self-conscious way—Smith genuinely seems to care about his characters, especially the can’t-win-for-losing Gabriel, and it’s not quirky for quirk’s sake. While his prose can be unadorned to a fault at times, his dialogue shines, and there’s an undercurrent of humor throughout that leavens the book’s darkness. (In one section, Gabriel says that he slicks his hair back “like a movie Italian.”) This novel isn’t for everyone, but readers who appreciate the morbidly funny and the just plain morbid will find a lot to love in these pages.

A weird and darkly funny novel from a writer to watch.