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. But even then it is difficult, for quite some time after finishing this novel, to dispel the sense of alarm that they create.

The Amnesia Clinic covers ground regularly encountered in the comic-literary first novel, namely the rites of passage of a pair of precocious, arty adolescents, but manages to stand out thanks to both the exotic location (a well-rendered Ecuador) and the unostentatious tightness of James Scudamore’s prose. The novel is narrated by Anti, an extremely bright yet unglamorous English boy whose parents’ careers have brought him to Ecuador. Anti’s safe, ex-patriate life is enlivened by his more charismatic classmate, Fabián, who lives with a rich, eccentric uncle following the death of his parents in a car crash.