What is Skin Trade about?
Hiding as a boy in a zombie ridden wild west, Samantha is thrust into the service of the skin trade; the terrible deed of trapping and skinning the undead for profit. The work is grueling and perilous, but along the way she finds out what it takes to be a man, why she misses being a woman, but most of all she learns what it means to be human.
Our Skin Trade Review
With the title Skin Trade one might actually think that the story would be something that is erotic and bordering on soft core adult reading material. Far from it. Tonia Brown’s Skin Trade is a zombie novel of the highest caliber.
The time frame for the story could be somewhere in the mid to late 1800’s or even some time after a major zombie outbreak and US is attempting to rebuild itself. That really isn’t all that important. What is important is that the story is about how the US has fenced off the west and created the ‘Badlands’. Inside these Badlands, revenants, what the infected are referred to, roam with impunity. The only people who enter these Badlands are the skin traders and exiles. Skin Traders are just that. Similar to the great buffalo hunters that roamed the plains, skin traders roam the Badlands hunting and trapping revenants for their skin. Using a secret technique, they cure the skin and remove the infection then sell this cured skin to the people on the east coast who then make wallets, purses and maybe even watch bands out of it.
Enter Pete and Sam, two young boys who are in a work house on the border of the Badlands. The headmaster of the workhouse is a Fagan like character who works the boys hard and barely provides enough food for them. When an opportunity arises to get rid of Pete and Sam by selling them off to a skin trader as apprentices, he jumps at the chance to remove them from his fine establishment. The only problem is that Sam has been hiding a secret from all the boys at the house and their new employer immediately finds out what that is.
Not knowing that little tidbit of information, Sam and Pete enter the Badlands with Boudreaux and Dom not really knowing what to expect. Events transpire and its revealed that Boudreaux is not hunting revenants, he’s ‘farming’ them. Sam’s secret is discovered but before anything can be done about it, another skin trader, Theo, arrives on the scene and … well shit happens.
Skin Trade is a story that you don’t want to give too much away when you talk about it. The world that Tonia has created is amazing and rich in detail. The whole concept of using revenant skin for fashion items is a wild take on the whole beaver and buffalo hunting and trapping that took place in from the 1700’s to the 1900’s. The characters that she has created to inhabit this world are so well defined that there is no issue relating to them or immersing yourself into the the story. The plot is tight, no extraneous material that is not directly related to the plot has been added. This is only the second Tonia Brown book that I’ve read and I will admit that I will be seeking out the rest of her work.
