Skin: The Five Main Characters

The suspenseful Christian science fiction novel written by Ted Dekker, titled Skin, is set in the small town of Summerville, Nevada, which is surrounded by miles of desert. Wendy Davidson, an escapee from a cult, meets up with Nicole and Carey Swartz, who are two siblings that prefer to avoid discussion about their past. They go to find refuge in Summerville when three tornadoes touch down, and while searching for a doctor, stumble upon Colt Jackson, a police deputy. The four characters make their way to the town doctor’s house, which is built like a fortress. There they meet up with not the town doctor, but Jerry Pinkus, who is a professional gamer. All five of main characters are driven into the doctor’s library, where serial killer Sterling
When they don’t, Carey takes the gun, and shoots Nicole himself. When the other characters don’t kill Carey, Sterling Red hangs him. Pinkus, Carey, and Wendy start to have weird, unexplained blackouts, and Red becomes more and more desperate to make themselves commit suicide to destroy the ugliness. This is when Wendy starts to put the pieces together. The five main characters are all part of a virtual reality video game, and the blackouts are part of them coming out of their imaginative state. The game, called Skin, had one objective: kill anything that wasn’t “beautiful”. Sterling Red had been a sixth player of the game, but he discovered a way to manipulate the game to make his own rules. He changes the game so that the characters are supposed to destroy anything that lacked inner beauty. Wendy, Pinkus, and Colt have to recognize that no one is truly completely beautiful on the inside, and this enlightenment can make them more powerful than Red, by having more understanding of the game. This enables them to defeat Red, and be pulled out of the game. When they exit
They are given psychotropic drugs that make them feel everything that they see in the game in the made-up town of Summerville, and have realistic conversations with characters in the game. Timothy Healy is the player with the lowest scores in Skin, so by using the intelligence he inherited from his father, he manipulates the game by programming it from within to portray himself as the psychopath, Sterling Red, and force the other characters into a game with his new rules that will eventually lead to their downfall. He creates pasts for them that would make them all lack the inner beauty that his version of the game requires, so that they would eventually have to destroy themselves. When the other characters start to realize what’s going on, he tries to quickly kill them off as fast as he can, but he only succeeded in killing Nicole and Carey before the other characters kill him. When these three players are killed in the game, it forces their IV’s to shut