Diabolical Plots #128, October 2025

“(Skin)” by Chelsea Sutton

“Resurrection Scars” by Sheila Massie

Reviewed by David Wesley Hill

Let me admit this straight out—I detest (hate) parentheses. Next to the semi-colon, they’re my (least) favorite punctuation mark. They (jarringly!) interrupt the flow of narrative, jolting the reader from the story, and (if a punctuation mark were a mouth) scream “meta” (nudge, nudge) from the rooftops. Unfortunately, “(Skin)” by Chelsea Sutton, the first October offering of Diabolical Plots, purposely (over) uses parentheses from page one in an attempt to elevate an otherwise silly (inane) tale about Estelle Irby’s Skin (don’t ask me why the word is capitalized (throughout)) deciding to leave her dead body and take a walk, only to be kidnapped (skin-napped?) by an evil (greedy) doctor and his (Zumba-loving) nurse. You might like the story if you’re an English Lit grad student going through a John Barth (parenthetical) period, but otherwise take a (hard) pass (((!))) on this one.

Next up is “Resurrection Scars” by Sheila Massie, which introduces us to two unnamed characters, one of whom is dead. Disregarding their lover’s explicit order that she is not to be resurrected, the protagonist carries her corpse down into “the blood-drenched womb of the world where the ishetim await” and has her brought back to life by these subterranean sorcerers. It’s a truism that nothing good ever comes from disobeying a deathbed request, and nothing does in this sad tale, whose denouement is as melancholy as it is predictable.