Guest post written by Marginal author Tom Carlisle
Tom Carlisle is interested in horror centred on folklore and religious belief. In 2017 he graduated with distinction from Bath Spa’s Creative Writing MA, also winning the Bath Spa Writer’s Award for outstanding writing. Originally from the north of England, he now lives in Bristol with his family. Blight is his debut novel. He tweets at @tjcarlisle.
About Marginal: A man returns to the cult he escaped from to bury his brother, only to discover the past is monstrous, hungry and mutating, in this devilishly gory body horror. Perfect for fans of Adam Nevill and John Carpenter.
“Healthy things grow.” That’s a phrase that I remember a friend saying as proof that the church I attended as a teenager was doing something right. Surely it couldn’t be doing evil if people wanted to go there. I wish I’d had the wit to answer: “so do tumours”.
As it was, I didn’t recognise some of the subtle impacts that community was having on me until years later. My latest novel, Marginal, is born from that experience. It’s a story about realising that something has planted a seed in you, one that could grow into something dreadful.
That’s been part of body horror since the very beginning: the sense of having something alien inside of you, growing in its own way, with no respect for the limits of your flesh. It’s not hard to see why. Body horror touches on the boundaries of the self, personal autonomy, and issues of control. It’s visceral, often deliberately courting disgust. And it’s claustrophobic, because there’s no escape from your own body.
Body horror stories are having something of a moment recently, with the release of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance and the phenomenal success of Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea. It’s not hard to see why, because body horror is a uniquely good fit for our current cultural moment. But before we get to that, it’s worth exploring where it all started…
Early examples of Body Horror
If you’re looking for a Victorian story about a corrupting force working on you from the inside, the most obvious place to start is probably Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Dracula himself is a literal antichrist, corrupting the communion ritual by commanding poor virginal Lucy Westenra to drink his blood. Soon afterwards, she becomes a lascivious temptress.
But it’s not just Dracula himself who’s to blame for that transformation. In an attempt to save Lucy’s life, she’s one of the first to receive a blood transfusion, getting blood from “four strong men” (Arthur Holmwood, Quincey Morris, Dr. Seward, and Van Helsing). She’s never quite the same afterwards, the procedure making her more erratic and sexualised, as though all that virile manly blood has changed her at a deeper level.
Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde ploughs a similar furrow, although it’s interesting to note that Jekyll at first seems delighted by accessing his alter-ego, writing, “I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul.” Soon enough that sense of a foreign body recurs, though: the narrator records that Jekyll “had now seen the full deformity of that creature that shared with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and was co-heir with him to death”, ultimately coming to think of his alter-ego as “something not only hellish but inorganic.”
Still more interesting are the Victorian era’s deeper cuts. In Guy de Maupassant’s The Horla, the narrator is convinced that an invisible, parasitic being is invading his mind and controlling his actions. This alter ego ultimately cause a psychological breakdown, with the protagonist exclaiming, “I am lost! Somebody possesses my soul and governs it! Somebody orders all my acts, all my movements, all my thoughts. I am no longer anything in myself, nothing except an enslaved and terrified spectator of all the things I do.”
Elsewhere, in Arthur Machen’s The Novel of the White Powder (which is, ironically, only a short story), a man is given a mysterious powder to cure his sleeplessness and nervous irritation. His skin quickly begins to flake and peel:
“The blackened skin had peeled from the face and hands, and hung in discoloured shreds and patches upon the pillow and coverlet, and at times the odour of corruption grew so intense as to be almost insupportable.”
But that’s only the beginning. By the end of the story the white powder dissolves him entirely, with an admirable commitment to the anti-drugs message. Zammo would be proud:
“There upon the floor was a dark and putrid mass, seething with corruption and hideous rottenness, neither liquid nor solid, but melting and changing before our eyes, and bubbling with unctuous oily bubbles like boiling pitch. And out of the midst of it shone two burning points like eyes, and I saw a writhing and stirring as of limbs, and something moved and lifted up that might have been an arm.”
Similarly delightful is William Hope Hodgson’s The Voice in the Night, a precursor to Scott Smith’s 2006 novel The Ruins. It’s about a couple on an island who eat a mysterious fungus, only to find that the fungus starts eating back. “‘I reached to my hip for my knife,” recounts one of the unfortunate victims. “I got hold of it, and I tried to lift it out, but the sheath came away, leaving the knife behind. The leather had rotted with the damp and the use I’d given it. It had stuck to the skin, and—the skin had closed round it.”
As with The Horla, the boundaries between self and other quickly start to break down, with one of the unfortunates exclaiming late in the story, “I knew that I should never get away—never get away—that here I should stay, food for that Damned Thing that had made food of me already. I was done, fettered, caught—done.”
It’s even there in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Illyich, that sense of being trapped inside a decaying body. You can read all the anxieties of the Victorian era in these stories. It’s as though their authors were seeking a new form and language for their concerns, a “form that fits the chaos” as T. S. Eliot would write just a few decades later.
Body Horror now
So many of those Victorian concerns resonate today – the influence of toxins, ideas and technologies; the fear of contagion; our effect on the world’s fragile ecosystems.
Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation is a case in point, exploring the anxiety of influence: once something is inside you, reshaping you from the inside, then how do you get it out again? How do you trust your own perception, your own body?
The Biologist, writing about Area X, famously asserts “the effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.”
Like The Horla, Annihilation is a story about a kind of psychological breakdown, but Vandermeer’s great strength is in showing the colonising influence of Area X. How can you describe the horrors that are being wrought on you from the inside, when all you have are words? Or as the Biologist puts it, “what can you do when your five senses are not enough?”
That concern about colonialism recurs in in Sylvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, whose powerful and invasive fungi begin transforming people from the inside out. I’d say more were it not for spoilers: this is one novel best experienced blind. It’s there, too, in Scott Smith’s The Ruins, whose unfortunate protagonists soon discover that you can neither reason with nor defeat a sentient plant.
The Ruins deserves special mention both for its claustrophobic nature, and its unrelenting bleakness. It captures the horror of having a foreign body inside of you, and the lengths that you’d go to excise it, with astonishing force. You’ll feel every cut. Fair warning, though: it gets pretty bloody.
Finally, no article about modern body horror is complete without mentioning David Sodergren’s magnificent novel The Haar. It’s about a property developer who tries to exile an old woman from the fishing village where she’s lived her whole life. They’re not banking on the gloopy, shape-shifting entity that she discovers, which takes on the form of her ex-husband Billy.
What it lacks in existential terror, it more than makes up for in gory wish-fulfilment. It feels like a lost, great, ‘80s B-movie. The extract below tells you all you need to know about whether it’s for you:
The thing’s hands forced their way into Aaron’s mouth, grabbing his cheeks. It tore them wide open, the skin at the corners of his lips rending apart as a curious, painless sensation descended over him. He saw himself reflected in the mirror, neck bulging as the creature pushed its arm further down his throat, yet he felt no pain. He witnessed his own body sagging, and heard the snap of his ribs, one-by-one, until his torso was nothing more than a ghastly sack of blood. How was he still alive? How?
Body Horror forever
The forms of body horror adapt to fit the context. It remains a potent force, a way of expressing the anxieties of a given era. Just this month, The Substance has used body horror to explore our desire to stay young, and the lengths we’ll go to in order to present a beautiful image to the world. There are memorable body horror moments in The Colour Out of Space, Upgrade, The Void, Possessor. Even a story that seems ostensibly about demonic possession, like Talk to Me, explores the terror of having something alien inside of you, seizing control.
It’s impossible to separate body horror from its antecedents. Every body horror story carries the DNA of others; there is no Annihilation without The Horla, no Colour Out of Space without The Thing. Tim Waggoner wrote about this once, in his excellent how-to-write-horror book Writing in the Dark, where he claims “one of the most effective ways to create monsters is to deconstruct a trope, to reduce it to its core essence and then build your own monster from that core.”
That might sound derivative, but I’d argue that it’s anything but. These anxieties run deep, and as a species we’ve been searching for a language to express them for centuries. The challenge is to keep making it new, continually reformulating and reshaping what we’ve been given so it speaks to this moment. But thankfully, if recent examples are anything to go by, we’ll not manage to feel truly comfortable inside our skin any time soon.
