Second Skin

Michael needs the money. The role pays more than he's made in years: one week on a closed set, playing a dead woman named Maria Rose through a custom-grown second skin bonded directly to his body. The skin is made from his own cells. It matches his freckles, his scars, his heat signature. Once it's on, every camera and sensor on set will read him as Maria. The technicians promise the skin comes off cleanly. They promise it's only a tool. By the second day the skin is moving on its own. By the third it knows things about Maria that were never in the script. By the fourth Michael can feel it thinking underneath his real skin, patient and hungry, and he realizes the company has done this before. The previous actors who wore Maria's skin never fully came back—and the skin has no intention of letting Michael be the exception. A taut, unsettling novel of body horror and identity collapse, Second Skin asks how much of yourself you can give away before something else decides to keep it.