There’s a bar up top with five empty stars that you’re supposed to fill in (should be six in this case, all gold), but what there isn’t is a galaxy of stars where a forgotten astronaut called Baptiste returns to Earth as a silver messiah hellbent on overcoming death and ‘uplifting’ mankind to a state of complete control over themselves, each one of his new converts—now a destructive horde—proclaiming that ‘every part of them is dying.’ The only one who can stop Baptiste is Swanson, a deformed flyboy with a high tolerance for pain, armed with love, family, and the memory of what it means to be human.

A few great lines here about it: ‘It said we were foolish to have spent any time looking so far into space before looking within. Truly and diligently exploring and examining to the extent that we could someday command the pieces of ourselves we had no control over.’ Or: ‘Why were we staring at the stars at all before conquering ourselves? Because we were more than fools.’ Or better: ‘Heaven might not be made of clouds, might not have streets paved with gold, but it could be attained, or manufactured if necessary. It would be colder and emptier than priests and prelates might have foretold, but it would be as close to infinite as any mind would want to withstand.’

I’ll come right out and say this novel is phenomenal! Haven’t read anything by Compton (heard him interviewed, though), but I’ll be remedying that real soon. And I can’t believe this is the first SF novel he’s written. Project Hail Mary is making the rounds of late, and yeah, it’s great and has a lot of heart, and I’m not comparing or anything, but ‘Chimera Skin’ is better.

The style and prose are ridiculously good, not to mention how it shouldn’t really work. What I mean is, the novel is broken down into five parts, but the middle three parts take place almost exclusively in the past, all build-up. Compton hooks you with the first part and then proceeds to unfold all the events that lead to the beginning of the story, then part five perfects the landing. Structurally, you can do it, sure, but it’s super gutsy, reminded me of how PKD used to jump through time mid-paragraph, or how VALIS works so well but shouldn’t. Hard to explain; better experienced than talked about. Those middle parts are so believable and imaginative, and the writing is so engaging, that you forget there’s a big boss battle coming up soon.

You can read this in 1-2 sittings, easy, and you’ll probably end up highlighting like 25% of the lines because they just hit so hard. And Baptiste, as much as he’s the antagonist of the story, is thoroughly sympathetic, a hero in his own mind, at least. Some great lines regarding Swanson here: ‘If Colinfort, Louisiana was populated only with graves, Swanson would have come here to protect his memories of the dead.’ Or: ‘He could pair their voices with the smell of cloth and used dryer sheets when they folded clothes while watching television, and that made everything in the universe feel connected. It demystified cosmic complexities.’ Lastly: ‘I’ve got other people’s fingers on my hands, other people’s eyes in my head, other people’s voices trying to get out of my mouth, other people’s thoughts in my brain. I have to deal with all of that all the time. It never ends. But I haven’t gone crazy and started killing people who don’t deserve it, right?’

And here’s a line I just thought was killer: ‘One man wielding a flathead screwdriver couldn’t do this much damage if you gave him a week’s free reign in a coma ward.’

So yeah, read this, talk about it, pre-order a bunch of copies and give them to your friends and family, you won’t regret it. That ending too? Not only does it end on a perfect note (this thing in a glass jar), but Compton decides to take it one extra chapter after that even. And if you don’t feel something at the end of ‘Chimera Skin,’ then every part of you is probably already dead.