Butterfly Skin


Synopsis

A new psychological thriller that will take you into the dark depths of contemporary Russia.

Moscow is plagued with a series of gruesome murders. Ksenia, an ambitious young editor in the news department of a small but influential online journal decides to track down the serial killer, devising an elaborate website to entrap him and thereby boost her company's profile. She soon realises, however, that her obsession with the psychopath reflects something more deeply disturbing: her own unconscious mixture of horror and fascination with the sexual savagery of the murders.

Through his riveting plot and singular characters, Kuznetsov explores the sometimes pathological fallout resulting from our instant connectivity in the emerging world of emails, facebook, twitter, and other forms of electronic “intimacy.” The novel has enjoyed a cult following in Russia.

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My Review

This book is not your typical horror/serial killer book. It reads a little slow but it also reads like the poetic diary of a serial killer. Which sounds both intriguing and scary to climb into the mind of a psychopath. I am going to stop right here for a moment and throw out a huge warning that if you do not like gore then do not read this book. There is a lot of details spent talking about the murders. Which for me was not a problem. But for others it could be and even cause nightmares. One thing I did find interesting was how the killer talked about killing the women but in seasons. So, how spring affected the woman and how she died did differ from if the crime took place during winter. As much as I did like this book and the concept of it being very poetic, this very idea also kept me distant from the characters in the book. I did not become as emotionally attached and thus the reason that sometimes I struggled with the book in parts and stating it read slow. Overall, though I did like this book. International authors need to be recognized more for their work. With books like Butterfly Skin it does help.

A Choice Between Boredom and Blood

By SERGEY KUZNETSOVAUG. 16, 2014



About the Author
SERGEY KUZNETSOV was born in Moscow in 1966. In the 1990s he achieved a high profile as one of the pioneers of the internet in Russia, and has written for The New York TimesHarper’s BazaarPlayboyVogue and L’Officiel. His groundbreaking thriller BUTTERFLY SKIN has been translated into six languages, and in 2001 he became the first Russian journalist to receive a Knight Fellow scholarship from Stanford University. Besides being an entrepreneur and writer, he is editor-in-chief of Booknik, an internet publication on Jewish literature and culture. He lives in Paris.
 
About the Translator
ANDREW BROMFIELD has been a full-time translator from Russian for more than twenty years. He was a co-founder and original editor of Glas, a journal of modern Russian literature in English translation. His numerous translations include Mikhail Shishkin’s Letter-Book (The Light and the Dark), works by the Strugatsky brothers, Vladimir Voinovich, Pavel Pepperstein, Olga Slavnikova and Andrey Kurkov, as well as most books by Victor Pelevin and Boris Akunin, Mikhail Bulgakov’s A Dead Man’s Memoirs (A Theatrical Novel) and A Dog’s Heart (An Appalling Story), Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace – the Original Version and the two-volume Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia.

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