The Engineer Reconditioned

ABOUT “SPATTERJAY”

Spatterjay is the planet where all the action takes place in The Skinner, and all the characters and events here will be familiar to readers of that book This story is in fact a precursor, whereas from Snairls I only snatched Janer and his hornets. Again it was a story published in Grotesque (issue 8 ’95) and suitably so, though not enough so to justify changing the title to ‘Splatterjay’. It is a story whose genesis was in a nightmare of long blue and bony hands reaching out of dense jungle to grab someone, and of trout in a stream, which weren’t. It spent a number of years in a folder, in the form of a few scribbled lines, then grew out of some free-association writing I was doing to limber up my brain one day. Acorns and all that.