From Granta: the beginning of the forthcoming book Brat by Gabriel Smith. It’s a quick read that sells the book extremely well. It’s funny, and creepy in the want-to-look-away-but-can’t way:

The doctor was right about the skin on my chest, just to the right of where I assumed my heart was. It looked all weird.

I picked at the skin. It came away painlessly.

Just a little at first. It made a thick and translucent white flap. I flicked at it with my fingernail. I pulled at it. More pulled away like damp paper. Over my left nipple, then right up to my armpit.

The publisher’s pitch:

Gabriel’s skin is falling off.

His dad is dead.

He owes his editor a novel.

His girlfriend won’t answer his calls.

Tasked by his horribly well-adjusted brother with clearing out the family home for sale, Gabriel’s sanity quickly begins to unravel. His parents’ old manuscripts appear to change each time he reads them. A bizarre home video hints at long-buried secrets. And there’s a hideous man in the garden.

Disquieting and hilarious, taut yet lyrical, blisteringly-paced but formally inventive, Brat is a mediation on grief, art and love that will leave you altered, breathless and desperate for more. 

The US bookshop page has a little more clarity:

The Gabriel of the novel is mourning the death of his father as well as a recent breakup and struggling to finish writing his second book. Alone and aimless, he agrees to move back into his parents’ house to clear it out for sale. Here, the clichés end.Gabriel has trouble delivering on his promises: as the moldy, overgrown house deteriorates around him, so does his own health, and large sheets of his skin begin to peel from his body at a terrifying rate.

The book comes out June 6.

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