Oh my goodness. Did you ever get to thinking that "down on your luck" isn't just an expression? And that what we need here is a bigger statement? Something that adequately describes the scope of the situation? Like when your ex-wife spends all of her time angrier than a five-dollar pistol at everything on the planet, but mostly at you (well, really only at you, and she brings back your record collection, but she sets fire to it on your porch and the flames spread to your house and that just proves what you've said all along: that she is crazier than a box of frogs. Or when your ninety-year-old stick of a father uses his gnarled up knuckly fingers to apply "the nut twister" on you every chance that he gets. And you haven't been with a woman for a very long time and about the only chance you will ever have of getting laid again is to crawl up a chicken's ass and wait.

This shit is dire. Well, what I mean is that "down on your luck" doesn't quite cut it when bad luck has become a way of life. You just have to remember: You can have everything you want in this life. Provided all you want is a stained mattress and a hangover.

Skin House is a story about two guys who end up in the same bar they started out in. Maybe they're slightly better off than they were at the start. Or maybe not. One has a girlfriend though. They both have a little extra cash, enough to order nachos whenever they want to without going through their pockets first. They're not dead, and that's something right there. And they're not arrested, which is the quite surprising part.

Michael Blouin is a ReLit Award winning author for Best Novel in Canada, has been shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award, the bpNichol Award and the CBC Literary Award and is a winner of the Diana Brebner Award and the 2012 Lampman Award. He has been published in most Canadian literary magazines including Arc, Descant, Branch, Dragnet, The Antigonish Review, Event, Queens Quarterly and Fiddlehead, and has served as an adjudicator for The Ontario Arts Council, the Ottawa Book Awards, Carleton University, and This Magazine.

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