In Cold Skin, a brilliantly suspenseful début novel

In Cold Skin, a brilliantly suspenseful début novel by Albert Sánchez Piñol set in the years after the end of the first world war, a young man arrives on a desolate Antarctic island, where for the next 12 months he will study the local climate. Oddly, his predecessor, who was due to be collected, cannot be found; there is only a half-mad lighthouse-keeper, who appears to be the island’s only other inhabitant — or so it seems until night falls, when the man hears the patter of feet outside his window.

The novel borrows from so many popular genres — horror, thriller, B-movie — and yet ultimately transcends them all and is classifiable only as an excellent book. The man’s nightmarish adversaries, of which, it turns out, there are thousands, are terrifying for combining savage rapacity with a curiously childlike appearance. Later, when he tries to understand them, they naturally lose some menace, since it is Piñol’s intention to show that the greater part of fear lies in ignorance.