Sometimes love is supposed to stink.
Employing a combination of tall tale, science fiction, and sardonic humor, Skunk tells the story of Damien Youngquist, a loner who becomes addicted to skunk musk. As his social difficulties grow increasingly (and hilariously) painful, Damien tries to isolate himself, first in an East Coast suburb, then on a farm in the Midwest, in order to indulge his addiction in peace. But he finds his efforts thwarted by disgusted coworkers, nosy neighbors, and dangerous rednecks. When he falls in love with Pearl, a brilliant scientist who has made revolutionary discoveries of her own, Damien’s life gets even more complicated. Oblivious to the global impacts their pet projects will have in the hands of people driven by greed, Damien and Pearl struggle to save each other from themselves. Skunk is an imaginative exploration of addiction, chemistry, organic farming, and love.
Praise for Skunk: A Love Story
“An obsession for skunk musk sends a young man on a picaresque journey in Courter’s darkly comedic first novel… illuminating the many varieties of obsession and its strangest consequences.” —Publishers Weekly
“The story of Damien Youngquist—the annoyingly anal copy editor turned junkie who nearly loses it all chasing the skunk “musk dream”—is as dark and twisted as it is tender and hilarious. From the love of Youngquist’s life, a fish fetishist named Pearl, to his bumbling anarchist neighbor Robbie, Courter creates characters so grossly flawed and dysfunctional that they could almost be real. Skunk brims with repugnant imagery that defies genre, but also reaches new levels of coherent realism and maniacal science fiction. Addiction, love and finding a place in the world is Skunk’s message, but the novel really jumps off the shelf because of Courter’s wicked gift of description and keen sense of story—it’ll have you retching one minute, then trying to find a suitable skunk to milk the next.” —Sacramento News & Review
“To the ranks of literary grotesques add persons with olfactory affliction, an abnormality that renders Damien Youngquist—like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Incredible Hulk, Frankenstein’s monster, and other of his fictional forebears—at once repellent and sympathetic. Damien is addicted to skunks: first to their smell, then to drinking their musk. Soon too malodorous for society, he settles contentedly into a remote cabin, subsistence farming, and the company of his charmingly domesticated skunks. But solitude becomes less idyllic when Damien falls passionately in love with a woman he finds a bit repellent (she is addicted to canned fish and smells like it), loses her, and finds her again in an outrageous, darkly humorous love story with its own kind of happy ending.” —Bostonia
“… a mesmerizing glimpse into the mind of a man who has a skunk fetish.” —Bloomsbury Review
“… this bizarre love story is dark in its obsessions and their most dire consequences of blindness and psychiatric treatment… light-hearted and humorous at times and rife with colorful small-town characters… A tribute to Courter’s writing talent is that the story makes readers slightly leery of their own seemingly innocent addictions.” —ForeWord
“ Thoreau meets Timothy Leary in this outrageous and cautionary tale of what happens when two olfactory obsessions collide. An audacious debut.” —Brian Evenson, author of The Open Curtain, Dark Property, and The Wavering Knife
“ The skunk-obsessed narrator of Justin Courter’s excellent, off-kilter love story leads his lucky reader through a flare-lit labyrinth of unusual, and unusually rewarding, instances. This is fine, fierce writing: an auspicious debut.” —Laird Hunt, author of The Impossibly, Indiana, Indiana and The Exquisite
Read the first three chapters of
Skunk: A Love Story
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