After politely questioning her hitchers about their social attachments, Isserley drugs them, disguises them, and drives them back to a farm, where they stay locked in dark cages for a month, tongueless and castrated, before a butcher deftly turns them into steaks, fillets and offal.įrom this premise, which admittedly sounds like a particularly inane episode of 'Star Trek,' Faber constructs a compelling, unusual tale about species difference and the limits of compassion. Puny, scrawny specimens were no use to her.' The hitcher must also lack family or close friends whose suspicion might be aroused if he were to disappear. Under the Skin, Michel Faber's first novel (he has previously published a Saltire Prize-winning collection of short stories, Some Rain Must Fall), deals with one of the less likely but more serious prospects: being kidnapped by an alien masquerading as an earthling, then caged, force-fed, and fattened before being butchered into delicacies for the alien's home planet.įaber's protagonist is Isserley, an alien surgically altered to resemble a slim, large-breasted woman who cruises the Scottish highlands in a Toyota Corolla looking for male hitchers with 'big muscles: a hunk on legs. It's a dangerous game, a calculus demanding that we weigh the slight advantage of a quick, cheap ride against the irritation of being stuck in a small space next to a dull conversationalist or suffering something grislier and more permanent. All of us have probably been warned against hitchhiking at one time or another.

Under the skin isserley