Strange Horizons, October 23, 2017

“end at the skin” by Melissa Moorer

Reviewed by Victoria Silverwolf

Although the editors have chosen to label “end at the skin” by Melissa Moorer as poetry, it is written in the form of prose, and will be reviewed here as fiction. This is a difficult task, as the story is almost completely opaque. As best as I can tell, the narrator is an utterly alien entity describing a human being in ways that are nearly incomprehensible to the reader. It starts off in the form of a scientific report, but by the end that pretense is abandoned and it evolves into a burst of surrealism. The author fails to create a poetic mood or communicate a meaningful message.

Victoria Silverwolf thinks that only e. e. cummings should avoid capital letters.