Here’s me thinking around the idea of ‘body horror’ through five books over at Queen Mob’s Tea House:
“Body horror tends to deal with the too-much or too-little; with excesses and scarcity of form that test what our conceptions of the functioning body can be. But central to the idea of it, perhaps, and where the real horror lies, is the exposure of our unwillingness to really look at what our bodies are; how they function and how they degrade. Here, in reality, where the greatest body horror story is perhaps reduced to the two word “palliative care”, literature can do what genre films are generally forbidden from doing — to explore themes in a way that’s ill-fitting with their necessarily simple splattery aesthetic. Here, there’s room for tenderness. I’ve chosen five hopefully lesser-read examples of books that capture the body in its transformation, or flowery grotesqueness, or that simply present us with a point to start considering how the body — as we accept it — is in itself already an incongruous combination of disparate forms.”