Skin Grows Over by Lucy Elizabeth Allan

A young woman who has never learned how to grieve begins to come apart following the loss of the one friend who truly understood her. A mysterious and obsessive Humanist celebrant prepares to perform the most important funeral of her life. A world-weary and weather-beaten museum custodian resigns herself to hosting a mysterious ceremony that goes against everything she believes in. Connecting the three of them, a centuries-old bog mummy, hovering around it all, watching, waiting to be put to rest.

Skin Grows Over weaves realism with uncanny horror, using images of deep history and the otherworldly Scottish wilderness to tell a very modern tale about grief, queerness, and female embodiment. In a culture where dead women are objects of immaculate peaceful beauty existing only to be mourned by others, this grotesque and earthy dead woman who refuses to stay dead comes to represent the uncanny overlap of grief and female embodiment, in all its ugly humanity.