MONSTERS DON’T AGE well. But, in compensation, they can periodically come back from the dead. Witness Dracula, Godzilla or, most recently, King Kong.

There is a definite life cycle, however. The newly minted monster is a truly adult terror. (We lose sleep. Part of us really wants them to go away.) Longer acquaintance begins to domesticate them. They become our ally against newer, scarier monsters. (Godzilla fights off Mechagodzilla.) Their decline continues into camp and then outright cuteness. We make toys of them. (Dracula as a Muppet.) Finally, they end up as comforting presences for children.

This may explain why it is such a long time since anybody did sea monsters seriously. (Jon Pertwee’s Doctor Who faced down some camp sea devils in 1972.) It may also explain the peculiar frisson when, early in Albert Sánchez Piñol’s Cold Skin, we witness the following: “The lower part of the door had a kind of hatch . . . The arm was sticking out of it. A whole arm naked and elongated. It was feeling around for something inside with spastic jerks. Maybe the lock? It was not a human arm. Although the oil lamp and the fire gave only a dim light, I could see that the three bones at the elbow were smaller and pointier than ours. Not a speck of fat — pure muscle coated with shark skin. But the hand was worst of all. The fingers were joined by a membrane that went all the way up to the nails.”

Here, in the same moment, are strangeness and recognition, nostalgia and horror — in other words, a genuine return of the repressed. Surely a humanoid sea monster isn’t really going to scare us? The unnamed hero is terrified enough. It is some time just after the First World War. For reasons that are unclear, he has felt the need to get as far away from civilisation as possible and has accepted a posting on a tiny Antarctic island. He is to live in a small cottage and monitor the weather. His only companion will be the lighthouse keeper, Gruner. When the hero tries to introduce himself, Gruner appears to have gone completely mad. He is naked, bearded, unkempt and monosyllabic. When asked where the previous weather monitor is, he refuses to answer.

Then night falls. There is a patter outside that sounds like rain. Then the arm appears through the door. It’s soon clear enough what happened to the previous weather monitor — and why Gruner doesn’t want to talk about it.

What follows is a thrillingly vivid hallucination. While I was reading Cold Skin, it overtook my dreams almost entirely. I was on the island. I was under attack. I was surely going to die.

The elements could hardly be simpler: two men, one castle (the lighthouse), many wild monsters, one tame monster. But, employing these limitations, Sánchez Piñol creates a struggle for survival that is, at the same time, a meditation on humanity. This isn’t horror for horror’s sake. It approaches some kind of archetype — of isolation, of threat, of melancholy, of the desire for companionship.

Cold Skin is an island story, following a long line from The Tempest through Robinson Crusoe, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Kafka’s In the Penal Colony right up to The Beach. It’s a more than worthy addition. A monster is reborn.

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