I don’t watch horror movies. I don’t mind the occasional psychological thriller or suspense tale, but like the Supreme Court in 2000, I draw my personal line at gore. I wish I liked them! My friends seem to derive great joy from horror movies. I stopped the Scream franchise after the second installment, but many gay people have developed entire personalities around it.
I trace my aversion to gory horror back to my childhood and two specific facts: 1. my family owned a funeral home and 2. I was a very vivid dreamer. My mother was incredible at allowing me to explore just about whatever culture I wanted - the early days of MTV, whatever smutty books I could find around the house, etc. - but she sheltered me from traumatic horror and anything with guns. (Mixed results on the latter, by the way, as I’m a gun abolitionist and my brother owns a whole arsenal.) My mother knew, correctly, that I would have insane horror-filled dreams if I were allowed to watch those movies. I freaked out at the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, so there was no way I was going to handle Freddy Krueger with any easy.
She also knew that I would transfer any anxiety I had about horror movies to the very many corpses my family was taking care of in our funeral home. Just like Fun Home, I was gay, hanging in rural-ish Pennsylvania, and believed my life to be a musical. And just like Six Feet Under, I was gay with a brother named Nathan. I learned to parallel park in a hearse, I’ve hidden in caskets, and posed in front of leftover funeral flowers for school dances.
I didn’t realize that any of this was strange until I got to college and started telling childhood stories of going on road trips with my family to retrieve dead bodies to aghast faces. Adding horror movies to this already bizarre lifestyle would have been a destabilizing force that no one, especially my parents, wanted to deal with. Now, I’ve got a deadpan, morbid sense of humor to show for it.
Anyway, this is all to say that I remain a sensitive baby who can barely handle a jump scare or a blood splash. So, it’s notable that the Tournament of Books included 3 queer body horror books to their short list, and the Philadelphia free library conspired to send all 3 of them to me in a row. Unlike my family’s best clientele, I survived. See below!
THE LIBRARY IS OPEN
Monstrilio
by Gerardo Sámano Córdova (2023)
Monstrilio is your classic ‘boys dies, mom takes part of dead boy’s lung and nurtures it into a new child, new child causes havoc’ story. We begin in upstate New York where a mother and father are mourning the death of their only son. They sit near his deathbed and cradle the body of their son, born with only one lung, shortly after his final breath. The mother, less weepy than the father, decides that she wants to keep a part of her son to remember, and rather than snipping a lock of his curly hair, she cuts his chest open and takes a part of his lung. A messy endeavor as you can imagine, this causes a rift in the family, and she returns to her hometown of Mexico City to have some time to herself. Hard to explain, but because of a manufactured sense of dread, this is all less sad than it sounds.
While in CDMX, her mother’s housekeeper tells her an ancient tale about how you can feed a part of a body from a dead person and grow another human, but of course, doing that will set forth a series consequences that no one would want to confront. Acting in grief, our mother decides to feed the lung delicious chicken broth. (I’m assuming it’s delicious because everything Mexico City is delicious.) The lung grows, crazy things happen, and the family has to confront grief, what makes someone human, and the monsters that lurk within all of us.
This book is more tender and beautiful than you’d expect a horror novel to be. The lung grows into a sensitive being who has to fight his monstrous urges to feed. At some point in the novel, for the sake of an ongoing powerful metaphor, almost everyone is revealed to be queer, even the little monster. (It’s like if one of the kids in Heartstopper has been grown from a lung and has the urge to eat the flesh of other mammals.) Parts of this novel are gross, as you might imagine from the lung extraction I’ve referenced, and some serious kinks are addressed. But the end of it made me tear up a bit. Like a little monstrilio after midnight, I too contain multitudes.
Read it if you like: folks tales, Berlin, Mexico City, bizarre gay comings of age, monsters.
Brainwyrms
by Alison Rumfitt (2023)
One should never judge a book by its cover, but if you wanted to indulge in the practice just one time, this is a good time to do it. As you can see above, there are disgusting worms coming out of the mouth of an understandably terrified looking person. If that sounds like the kind of thing that would interest you, then this book is a treasure chest of wonders for you. If this cover upsets you, it may not be the book for you. To underscore this, there’s a several-pages-long warning that kicks off the book that tells you that things are going to get gross and kinky and traumatic, and this is your final chance to turn back. Again, if your instinct tells you there are 100 other books you should be reading instead in this short life, follow that!
Frankie is a transwoman living in the UK where transness has finally been legally outlawed. Frankie’s workplace, a gender clinic, has recently been bombed by an anti-trans activist, and she narrowly survived, unlike her coworkers, she’s still working through her trauma when we meet her. The book alternates between her point of view and that of Vanya, a nonbinary person she met at a fetish bar where they begin a disturbing dom/sub relationship that uncovers secrets from both of them. We touch on abusive relationship, parasite fetishes, anti-trans violence, and more. One effect this book had on me, maybe as a defense mechanism, is that I kept singing this to myself:
This book was very hard for me to get through - as you know, goriness is not my thing at all - but after reading the whole thing, I was really struck by the comparison of transphobia to a ravenous parasite that makes its hosts go violently mad. I don't think I've ever read anything that merited the upfront warning like this book, but that's appropriate when you're trying to use horror to depict the real-life terrors of creeping fascism and deadly transphobia. The book won't be for everyone - I'm not even sure it's for me - but looking headlong into the terrors of today, the author stuck to the courage of her unwavering convictions in ways I appreciated.
I should also say there’s a stand-in character for JK Rowling, and it’s pretty hilarious.
Read it if you like: gore, fetishes, trans narratives, literal and figurative parasites, dragging TERFs.
Boys Weekend
by Mattie Lubchansky (2023)
Graphic novel time! Boys Weekend is a loosely autobiographical romp about a bachelor party in the near future. Our boys travel to a trash heap in the middle of the Pacific that has been refashioned into a Vegas-like resort for parties of all kinds. It is not explicitly stated, but it is implied that this party town has more of the bro-related elements of Vegas and less, say Celine Dion and Kylie Minogue residencies. My nightmare!
Another wrinkle in this horrific scenario is that our protagonist has recently transitioned and agreed to be best man before the transition. Now, at this bachelor party, the participants are all misgendering them and the groom himself doesn’t know what to do with their new relationship. The book follows the party through a series of events moments: cultish MLMs, literal and figurative monsters, submarine parties, hunting their own clones, toxic masculinity of all kinds, and some scary sea creatures.
There were some tender, beautiful moments in this novel amongst the mayhem. My favorites were the times when the protagonist had to deal with their own post-transition loyalty to a friend when it’s not being reciprocated. (Like so many coming out experiences, the alleged ally in this situation does a lot of centering himself.) It’s also fascinating to see our protagonist hunt their clone who appears as their physical body before transition - a figure that ends up saving them in the end. But I won’t say too much more about that.
All along, creatures and cults are stalking this party, but it’s the beautiful moments of post-transition self confidence and mediation on what we owe our oldest friendships that make the book worth picking up.
Read it if you like: graphic novels, creatures, making fun of Las Vegas, extreme capitalism reads, bad allies.
LIGHTNING ROUND:
It’s Awards Season, and I love returning to this read about how everyone is beautiful, but no one is horny.
Still meditating on what were the most and least important stories from 2023?
As far as resolutions go, these truths feel good.
Until next time…happy reading!