Skip to main content

Richo Reviews: Your Body Is Not Your Body, Various Authors (Tenebrous Press, 2022)

 One thing I love is a themed horror collection. An array of different takes on the same theme, commonalities spiraling off into individual and idiosyncratic concepts. Make that theme something as deeply personal as a trans perspective on body horror, and you have the makings of something not only exciting and inventive, but insightful, painful, powerful.

The variety on display here is dazzling and every story offers something unique; even some that explore similar territory on the surface do so through deeply personal lenses. Some are acutely, painfully in the present moment; others draw us to the distant past, imagined futures or other worlds. There are stories that invoke mundanity, the gothic, schlock, religious horror, science fiction, all spun around the anchor of the human body and its transformations. Speaking as someone who rarely feels grounded in his own body, these stories made me deathly aware of my chest tightening, my stomach churning, my skin crawling.

None of these stories are particularly long. This means that none outstay their welcome, but in fact several are incredible examples of what a talented writer can achieve in just a few pages. 'The Same Thing That Happened to Sam' by M. Lopes Silva, for example, is just long enough to say exactly what it needs to say; an angry, heartbreaking evocation of pain and hope. Devaki Devay's 'Lost in Reincarnation' and Ori Jay's 'Seaflowers', while very different stories, both fill their short wordcounts with beautiful, powerful imagery. 'Cholesterol-Monoxide' by W.N. Derring-Judith is a fragment of a gnostic nightmare, an oppressive collision of gears, goo and our fallen world.

These aren't the only standouts, of course. Joe Koch's 'Chironoplasty' is typically masterful and transgressive. Hailey Piper's 'Why We Keep Exploding' is a masterful combination of allegory and anger. Rain Corbyn's 'Tonsilstonespunksplatter666!' is both deeply humane and playfully punk - until it is angrily, fiercely, screamingly punk. In 'The Divine Carcass' Bitter Karella weaves a gothic tapestry through space, the human body, and the very throne of god. Astounding. And there are more, more, more - more stories strong enough to rend flesh, to melt bone, to dissolve you to ichor. Stories of pain, of power, of becoming. Who knows what you will be after this book has worked its changes on you?


(I read this book as part of the Trans Rights Readathon, raising money for Transgender Action Block. You can support them too at https://linktr.ee/transactionbloc or find out more about the readathon here)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Horror Games: Parasite Eve

     A few weeks ago my partner and I finished playing Parasite Eve , a game close to her heart but one I'd never tried. I had a vague idea of what it was like - a survival horror game with RPG elements - and the basics of the plot - an outbreak of 'intelligent' mitochondria taking over the humans that carry them. I admit that the latter was a thing that had put me off the game previously; 'but that's just not how mitochondria work', I had scoffed, essentially. But that simplistic dismissal of the game had kept me from a horror experience that I'm still thinking about now.     Parasite Eve  is the story of Aya, a NYPD officer who, in the game's dramatic opening sequence, is attending the opera on a date. At the crescendo of the performance, a singer who calls herself 'Eve' - a reference to the famed mitochondrial Eve that the game later makes explicit - causes the spontaneous combustion first of the rest of the cast, and then nearly the entire au...
4 comments
Read more

Richo Reviews: Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin (Titan Books, 2024)

Camp Resolution is a brutal and degrading conversion camp for parents to turn their LGBTQ teens into the cishet kids they want them to be. But in the summer of 1996, a group of teens at the camp begin to suspect that it hides something even darker. This is the latest by Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of the excellent Manhunt, and much like that book it is a harrowing, frenzied masterpiece. I'll just tell you at the top: this book is exceptional, and you should read it. But if you want more convincing than just 'I said so', here we go: The first thing that truly stands out is Felker-Martin's skill at character, at psychology. We saw this in Manhunt , and once again Felker-Martin demonstrates an incredible talent for getting inside the heads of her characters. Even the character we follow for the prologue, a mother suppressing her concerns about sending her daughter to Camp Resolution, is a fully-fleshed person, a scathing and disturbing portrait of a woman simult...
Post a Comment
Read more

Richo Reviews: The Narrator, Michael Cisco (2015, Lazy Fascist Press)

 An army is a horror. It's a horrible thing. They say you might change your mind about that when the country is invaded and your people are suffering wrong, but for me this is all just more horror, more army-horror.  Cisco wastes no time in getting to the punch with this novel, and this searing and clear-eyed voice drives the reader like a vengeful officer on a harrowing march through a landscape of nightmare, brutality and absurdity. Low, our protagonist - and (perhaps) the eponymous figure - is a student in a fantastical, dreamlike realm, called up to serve both as soldier and narrator in a convoluted war. Low's position as a 'military narrator' doesn't just serve as an introduction to the alien culture of its world - this is from the off a story about stories, about who gets to tell them and which we hear, and how they shape reality. This theme manifests in many forms, both more direct - such as Low's encounter with an enemy narrator later in the novel, or th...
2 comments
Read more