Body horror as a literary subgenre stretches back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, considered the first sci-fi novel. With Shelley’s pioneering political parents, the radical company she kept, and her own body ravaged by back-to-back failed pregnancies, it’s hard to separate the fictional monster’s tale, and therefore body horror, from feminist analysis. Today, with women’s rights and bodies still battlegrounds, the stories in A Darker Shade, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, rip apart gender conventions with a terrible but ingenious vigour, both symbiotic with and symptomatic of our time.
Building on Shelley, Aimee’s Bender’s Frank Jones births her monster, piece by piece, from a maligned office worker – embracing the ‘freak’ she’s labelled as; Joanna Margaret’s Malena involves the growth of a parasitic twin while Lisa Tuttle’s Concealed Carry transfigures flesh into a deadly weapon in America’s gun capital. Margaret Atwood and Cassandra Khaw provide full-body Medusa transformations in Kafka-esque and werewolf fashion respectively, but Aimee LaBrie’s necrophiliac ballad is the most stomach-churning.
Perhaps most affecting is the metaphysical: Tananarive Due’s Dancing turns misogynoir into an affliction amplified by grief and generational trauma, combining medieval dancing mania with the Candyman films. Not for the faint of heart but the scaly of flesh.
A Darker Shade: New Stories Of Body Horror From Women Writers, Joyce Carol Oates [ed.] (Footnote)
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words HANNAH COLLINS