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A DARKER SHADE OF NOIR; NEW STORIES OF BODY HORROR BY WOMEN WRITERS is a rich collection of horror stories curated for aficionados of this subgenre by master of her craft Joyce Carol Oates, who also contributes a story.
An off-again on-again fan of horror, I was unfamiliar with the term body horror. Apparently this subgenre focuses on grotesque, disturbing violations of the human, or other, body - including mutations, mutilations, gratuitous violence, aberrant sex, and disease. This collection contains stories dealing with all those elements, and the overall impact is sometimes unbearably horrifying. Perhaps precisely what horror fans seek…
The quality of the writing is excellent: the reader's skin will crawl, the gorge may rise, and the collection is guaranteed to keep sleep at bay. The bizarre and distinctive twists in each of these
tales linger eerily in the mind.
In Part 1: You've Created a Monster, one protagonist creates little dolls from her own skintags which unsettle her co-workers. Another is seized with an uncontrollable desire to dance, apparently bestowed by her recently deceased grandmother. A child's night-time visit to a haunted house, where a doctor inexplicably murdered his wife, suggests the house infects those who enter it. An artist carries the remnants of her unborn twin inside her; it seems to have a will of its own. A mother's obsession with her physical appearance leads her to undertake truly bizarre "cosmetic" surgery.
Part 2, Morbid Anatomy, contains a bizarre and hilarious tale of a snail reincarnated as a customer service representative at a bank (by Margaret Atwood, it is perhaps the most distinctive tale in the book). In another story, a gun takes on, shall we say, a life of its own. A woman who abuses herself physically and sexually as part of her art installations loses her grip. A young medical student's grisly initiation with a corpse has revolting results. We experience in intense detail a character's gory transformation into a werewolf. A woman's attempt to protect a friend from further encounters with a vampire may come a little too late.
The first story in Part 3 (Out of Body, Out of Time) is an account by a woman in 1853, who was fatally confined to a chair of tranquility (an extreme isolation device). This is followed by a story in which a production of Bluebeard's Wives contains "props" made of actual dead body parts. A woman defaced by smallpox takes a hideous revenge on a narcissistic young man who seeks to elope with her young daughter. A young bride discovers her scientific experimenting husband has created an artificial lover, whom the bride encounters with grim results.
These tales are highly imaginative. Some are so graphic as to be off-putting, others utterly fascinating. Most of the authors include unexpected turns and intriguing psychological context for the "events" described here.
With a single exception, not only the authors but the central characters are women. Thus the collection explores the darker side of the female psyche in a variety of original ways. Body horror is, by definition, pretty visceral. For readers who revel in the dark, the creepy and the disturbing, this collection will certainly satisfy. But I would not recommend it for the faint of heart… you might never sleep again!
§ Meg Westley is a writer and retired educator living in Stratford, Ontario.
Reviewed by Meg Westley, September 2023
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