Christian Baines

Christian Baines brings horror and queer urban fantasy together, drawing on an Australian background and a current home in Toronto. Skin, published by Bold Strokes Books in 2017, is a paranormal story set in New Orleans and told through several connected viewpoints. The city is not decorative scenery: memory, local belief, and the uncertain boundary between the ordinary and supernatural shape the book's movement. Its publisher classifies the work across horror, thriller, and urban-fantasy categories, reflecting Baines's preference for fiction that crosses familiar genre borders. His other novels include The Beast Without and The Orchard of Flesh in the Arcadia Trust sequence, as well as Puppet Boy and My Cat’s Guide to Online Dating. He has also written on theatre, travel, and queer life. In Skin, darker material brings intimate character histories into contact with a larger uncanny pattern across a compact novel. The book's New Orleans setting gives that pattern a specific cultural and physical atmosphere.