In today’s episode, we meet George Hovis, author of “The Skin Artist,” an edgy story set in the shadows of the shiny banking city we know as Charlotte, North Carolina, and a finalist in the 2020 Eric Hoffer Book Award in Fiction.

Fred Chappel, author and winner of the North Carolina Award for Literature, says that “Hovis displays a world we know and try to turn our gaze from. But the story is too powerful…and we readers watch, hypnotized, as the descent gathers friends, lovers and family into its vortex. Can such dark passages lead to hope?”

George starts the show with a reading early in the book where the main character ends up at a historic Charlotte bar after learning that his wife is having an affair and he sees Lucy for the first time, a woman covered in tattoos, with jet black hair down to her back.