Ted Dekker’s new thriller SKIN is one strange bird, and some of that’s even by design.

Realizing that the Tin Man antagonist of HOUSE succeeded in dredging up horror, Dekker again pits a tattered cast of the to-be-browbeaten against another villain who hides behind a mask. His name is Sterling Red, and he’s a serial killer with a condiment fetish.

After an initially confusing first few chapters, things improve greatly at the quarter mark when a fluke tornado takes away their entire town – except for a library – and replaces it with a desert where black trails mar the sky. Five characters find themselves trapped with Sterling Red in the library: a cop, a brother and sister, a former cult slave and a gamer with half a finger missing.

Then SKIN settles in to its nicely paced groove when ol’ Red announces he wants to play a game (don’t they all?): They have six hours to kill the ugliest person among them, or Red will slay the lot of ‘em. It’s yet another premise that would seem home in SAW, but if it works, it works.

Dekker relies heavily – perhaps too heavily – on dialogue as the victims-in-waiting bicker and argue about who’s the ugliest. Meanwhile, the town reappears without explanation, and disappears again just as quickly. This cycle repeats. Is it mass psychosis or are supernatural forces actually at work?

As feared, the revelation is not as exciting as the buildup. After pulling the back-and-forth routine a few times too many, it’s simply not earth-shattering enough to cut the mustard – so to speak, with that tangy yellow paste being Red’s murder-scene snack of choice. Yet I enjoyed being pulled way this way and that, being duped over and over again, all the way to the finish. Even when Dekker’s narrative teeters and threatens to derail, it’s still entertaining.

SKIN marks his first nonevangelical novel, and the change is evident. Clearly, Dekker’s aiming for the mainstream market, and I think he’s got the chops to crack it. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• HOUSE by Frank Peretti and Ted Dekker
• SAINT by Ted Dekker