Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author Jo Kaplan’s short story collection ventures into the haunted geographies of waterways, woodlands, homes, and cities to explore horrific transformations.

This Ill-Fitting Skin is told in four parts: Brine, Abode, Roots, and Towers. Dive into a river that flows between dimensions. Join a sorority house with a dark initiation ritual. Enter an ancient forest that won’t let you go. Rent an apartment hungry for new tenants.

In one story, a grieving daughter searches shipwrecks for her father’s body but discovers something far stranger living beneath the waves. In another, a grandmother in her dark bungalow tells the tale of how she once fell in love with a spider in the shape of a man. Meanwhile, a bored housewife slips into a new identity in a city of faceless strangers and begins to wonder whether she has become someone else—or whether she was ever herself to begin with.

Featuring both original works and stories first published in award-winning anthologies and literary magazines, this collection asks what happens when the places we inhabit begin to inhabit us in return. Strange and uncanny, the familiar crawls under your skin and wraps it around the keyhook at your front door, leaving you to unravel when you try to walk away.