Book Review - Radio1 - Henri PauCker
As I have only now learned, »The Skin (Die Haut)« was kindly reviewed on Swiss Radio 1 on August 5.
Henri Paucker, the station's literary expert, calls my Thriller »cool« - even if he doesn't consider my »cool« language to be entirely unproblematic:
Host: Coolness is apparently an important term, which is also apparently needed to aptly describe the debut novel, no, the debut thriller of a new Swiss author. Henri Paucker says why.
Paucker: Why? The book I would like to present to you today is entitled ›Die Haut‹ and is a thriller. It was written by Christian Heinke. And the book starts like this.
When the pain returned, Katherine couldn't help but smile.
I wondered where you had been for so long, she greeted him. He seized her again, his power taking her breath away. A grey nothingness spread before her eyes.
»Don't, Katherine!« the professor's soft baritone warned. »Don't pass out. Just hold on to the pain for a little while longer.«
»No problem,« she whispered, barely audible. She was being cynical.
This beginning of the book is like a menu card. It shows exactly where the reader is to be swept away to and how. First of all, into the pain that Kathrine is again assailed by. Brutally unbearable, but also old familiar. With minimal effort, the author manages that you get both at once. The toxicity of the pain on the one hand and the ability to live with it on the other. That's really cool. And if you don't think it's really cool, you're explicitly told that Kathrine stays cool even in the midst of pain.
»No problem,« she whispers to the professor. And she obviously means that cynically. As a grim but cool joke. That the pain and the endurance of pain, and on top of that the cynical staying cool, so that's the menu card that characterizes the thriller character as it goes on? Quite, yes, quite. But... But what? Not only the thriller characters are like that, but also the author himself.
And that's not entirely unproblematic. Why is that not entirely unproblematic? One side is pain and enduring pain. In the novel, it looks like this. Kathrin and with her six other women are world-famous models. Top models, sure. They endure the pain of starving themselves slim and stress. And they stay cool about it. But not only that. The thriller expects its characters and readers to endure something else entirely. A serial killer, for example, who kills, slaughters, gruesomely slashes one after the other of these models. This thriller is one of the bloodiest out there. With his first novel, the author obviously wanted to break all the blood records in the industry at once. And there lies something problematic from the author's point of view. He handles his bloodthirsty story like Katrin handles her pain. Cool.
Almost too cool. But there is an undeniable audience that finds sinewy, bloody excesses really cool. The more gruesome, the more awesome, I'd say. Sure, but even the first sentences about Katrin's pain clearly showed that the author could actually do that. Describe pain and still stay cool. And because you can feel that it could, they wonder that it does not. His horror scenes are absolutely horrible in terms of what happens, but in terms of the climate, in terms of the depiction, they are completely harmless and astonishing. Super cool, no, undercooled and casual. The author still quickly pulls the bacon through the mouth of the audience, which tastes blood orgies. And the audience that doesn't like energy butcheries? They won't read the book, will they?
Well, they do. And is then happy to be shot through a horror scene so easily. All in all, to the point.
To the point: The Skin is a masterpiece in terms of intelligence and style. And the small publisher Kameru was absolutely right to give the new author a chance. The fact that one's hair doesn't even really stand on end when reading this model butchery is something that only the vampires, the bloodsuckers among thriller readers really find a pity. But the tamer readers are perhaps still glad at the end that they can advance thanks to this supercool Christian Heinke into a terrain, where they would have never dared to enter until now. Into a terrain, where the blood splatters, but where you don't get any stains, not even on your soul. It stays really cool.
Host: Radio 1 literary critic Henri Paucker on Christian Heinke's debut thriller.
It was called ›Die Haut‹ and was published by ›Kameru‹.
Wow. I'll take that as a rather positive review for once ;-)