Hello. I’m Bob Pastorella, co-host of the This Is Horror podcast, website manager for This Is Horror, and writer. I’m the author of Mojo Rising, They’re Watching (with Michael David Wilson), and have numerous short-stories and non-fiction online and in print in various publications.
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Updates:
Starting my WIP over. Same concept, different approach. My protagonist is a former heavy metal guitarist suffering from arthritis, barely able to play for any length of time. He wrote a book about the lead singer of his band who died, which was optioned for a film, but that project fell through. The book got enough buzz to allow him to write full-time, but he needs to deliver another book, and the publisher is reluctant. He considers himself a rock music journalist and has the freelance bibliography to back that claim. This is the first time I am using a writer protagonist, though another project called Came Back Haunted (abandoned for now, for multiple reasons) featured a podcaster who had cobbled together a series of interviews into a book. I’ve avoided using this kind of protagonist since I started writing, mostly because Stephen King and Peter Straub did it best, at least to me. It seems too easy to write about a writer, but when considering this character is a heavy metal journalist, there is this feeling of rebellion. I think it will allow me to stretch my wings a little, and provide a challenge to give him a voice that balances crass and raunchy with referential and introspective. I also think it will give him a sense of honesty. Oh, there’s no unreliable narrator here, but someone who wants to know the truth about his father, no matter how painful, and unbelievable, it may be.
As of late, I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole called Urban Wyrd. I’ll write more about this in another issue, but the mode is fascinating. I say mode because Urban Wyrd isn’t a genre. It’s something much larger than a narrow category, and I feel it permeates a lot of what a lot of writers like myself enjoy. At least it puts some words on a feeling about certain projects and opens possibilities into all sorts of areas of exploration.
The Aesthetic of Body Horror
A recent debate that ended with me blocking a literature purist on social media got me thinking. Naw, scratch that … it pissed me off. While the discourse pitting literature vs. genre rages on, with the lit crew thinking an old genre writer like me doesn’t know what the ‘aesthetic’ means, it seems some people really don’t have a clue what body horror is. I’m not an expert on the subject, but since I’ve been a lifelong fan of horror, wrote and published a novella with some splattery and squirmy things happening to people, and you’re reading this essay about it right now, I’m what you get.
Body horror is NOT extreme horror.
Body horror is NOT splatterpunk.
There is no horror sub-genre called Splatter-porn. (But there is an extreme horror anthology that features stories that would fall under such a genre. And then there’s torture porn. Kinda related, but not part of this discussion.)
There IS overlap between body horror and extreme horror. Ditto for splatterpunk.
Body horror features the grotesque mutilation and alteration of the human body. The human body is one of those really important things we all have in common. (Yeah, I know … understatement of the year right there, but hang on.) Since we all have bodies, we tend to be extremely protective of them. Human bodies are the backbone of our identity. Especially our faces. We use our bodies to express a full range of emotions, communicating non-verbally in ways that are ingrained and universal. So it’s safe to say that when something changes how we look to others, the effects can be life-changing. Our self-image is vital to our survival amongst other humans, and something as small and insignificant as a bruised and blacked fingernail, or a chipped tooth, can have long-lasting consequences on how we present ourselves.
If our bodies change in strange and unexpected ways, the likelihood of it damaging or altering our identity is very high. Say, for instance, an experimental drug that could cure a terrible disease caused some humans to grow a mouth in their armpit, a mouth that can chew and swallow and always seems to be hungry, that mouth could destroy someone’s identity so thoroughly they may never recover from it. A hungry mouth in your armpit isn’t just something everyone can easily adapt to. For many people, a mouth in your armpit chomping at everything could be so traumatic and life-threatening that they may become reclusive, even suicidal. For others, they might learn to accept the sudden change, hiding it from others, feeding it in secret, but always fearing the mouth might take on a life of its own. And still, others could embrace the change, worship it even, form an alliance with others that have the same change, perhaps going as far as to organize together and attack those people who have only one mouth where it should be.
The lens of body horror examines those kinds of what-ifs. Body horror has the ability to shake the foundation of what it means to be human from both the singular identity aspect as well as the social group angle. As much as we strive to be individuals, we have a need to be the same as everyone else. Body horror blows that concept out of the water, often presenting us with someone changed in such a way they’ve become too different, too strange, and they no longer ‘fit it’ with the rest of us. They’ve become “the Other”. The horror flows in both directions, inciting fear externally with the masses while becoming the thing that haunts our worse nightmares internally.
Body horror isn’t this new thing that was invented by John Carpenter’s The Thing. Many folk and fairy tales involve body horror. Those early tales were usually cautionary tales designed to strike a nerve, and they often feature weird alterations of the human body to make the message clear. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde started as a wicked story Stevenson wrote while laid up in bed with an illness. It was his wife that suggested he slant it to exploring human duality, yet the abhorrent change that happens to Jekyll is just as chilling now as it was when the story was originally released. H.G. Wells’ science-fiction classic The Island of Dr. Moreau is perhaps the gold standard for body horror ‘literature’, giving us grotesque aberrations, high adventure, and a mad scientist to boot. George Langelaan’s “The Fly” was first published in Playboy magazine in 1957, and has been adapted numerous times and even made into an opera. David Cronenberg’s version of the film is all the more horrifying not just because of the gruesome practical effects but also because of how the main character ultimately embraces the radical change he’s going through. Contemporary writers such as Carmen Maria Machado and Kathe Koja use body horror to great effect, and their stories are able to connect to readers beyond the “gross-out” factor.
The “gross-out” factor is but one of the many sides of body horror and is on a sliding scale that can be dialed up or down for effect however the writer chooses. Peter Straub’s Floating Dragon features some extremely grisly body horror, especially when considering the fate of Leo Friedgood, a supervisor for a company working the Department of Defense. Poor Leo witnesses and later succumbs to the exposure of a weaponized gas at a research facility and not once does Straub resort to sensational, extremely violent descriptions of the side-effects of the gas. Yet, with careful language, Straub presents us with visceral images that strike the nerves where it counts. By dialing the descriptions down, he ramped the horror up. Some of that imagery will haunt me forever.
Lumping body horror into the same group as splatterpunk and extreme horror simply because they occasionally overlap is reductive and frankly insulting to those of us that use the nuances of body horror to explore identity and social constructs with our fiction. It almost feels silly calling body horror a sub-genre of horror because it has the ability to be its own thing and still infect other genres quite easily, including non-speculative fiction. As a trope, it is much more than just a buzzword for gruesome and gory entertainment. And even the goriest of scenes can provide a ton of social commentary non-genre stories struggle to grasp. Body horror has a very unique aesthetic that can allow our stories to be scary, thought-provoking, insightful, and completely gross-out, sometimes all at once.
Music: Crown Tony Martin (the ‘other’ Black Sabbath singer), Pink Floyd’s PULSE, One Night in San Fransisco: Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin, and Paco De Lucia.
Films: I watched this folk horror vampire film and fell asleep on it, if that gives you any idea what I thought about it.
TV: All of Us Are Dead. Watched the first episode, really enjoyed it, hoping they can maintain the tone for the next ELEVEN episodes. On deck soon: Yellowjackets.
Books: Folk Horror Revival: Urban Wyrd Volume 1: Spirits of Time. From Wyrd Harvest Press, this non-fiction reference tome covers the Urban Wyrd mode and all its trappings. So far, this book is very interesting, and quite accessible despite its academic overtones. Still The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte (again). Straub’s Ghost Story (again and again forever and ever), King’s ‘Salem’s Lot and The Shining, Good Samaritans by Will Carver.
Next Issue: Probably more about Urban Wyrd.
peace&love
Bob.