Tags

, , ,

“Bestselling editor Ellen Datlow (Lovecraft’s Monsters) delivers world-class body horror in all its gruesome, psychological, and shocking glory. Discover—if you dare—shockingly twisted tales of the human body that make The Twilight Zone seem like a children’s show. In Body Shocks, you will find twenty-nine chilling tales from storytelling masters including Carmen Maria Machado, Richard Kadrey, Seanan McGuire, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Tananarive Due, Cassandra Khaw, Christopher Fowler, and many more.

The most terrifying thing that you can possibly imagine is your own body in the hands of a monster. Or worse, in the hands of another human being.

In these 29 tales of body horror selected by World Horror Grandmaster Ellen Datlow, you’ll find the unthinkable, the shocking, and more: a couture designer preparing for an exquisitely grotesque runway show; a vengeful son seeking the parent who bred him as plasma donor; a celebrity-kink brothel that inflicts plastic surgery on sex workers; and organ-harvesting doctors who dissect a living man without anesthetic.

Table of Contents:
The Travellers Stay by Ray Cluley
Toother by Terry Dowling
Painlessness by Kirstyn McDermott
You Go Where It Takes You by Nathan Ballingrud
A Positive by Kaaron Warren
La Beauté sans verte by Genevieve Valentine
Subsumption by Lucy Taylor
Spar by Kij Johnson
It Was the Heat by Pat Cadigan
Atwater by Cody Goodfellow
The Transfer by Edward Bryant
Welcome to Mengele’s by Simon Bestwick
Black Neurology: A Love Story by Richard Kadrey
Cuckoo by Angela Slatter
Cinereous by Livia Llewellyn
The Truth That Lies Under Skin and Meat by Cassandra Khaw
Natural Skin by Alyssa Wong
The Lake by Tananarive Due
I’m Always Here by Richard Christian Matheson
The Look by Christopher Fowler
The Old Women Who Were Skinned by Carmen Maria Machado
Spores by Seanan McGuire
Sweet Subtleties by Lisa L. Hannett
Elegy For a Suicide by Caitlín R. Kiernan
Skin City by Gemma Files
A True Friend by Brian Evenson
What I Found in the Shed by Tom Johnstone
Fabulous Beasts by Priya Sharma
Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report by Michael Blumlein”

I got an ARC of this book.

I am a big fan of horror. Body horror is a genre I prefer to be strictly in book form though. I have such a visceral reaction to it that I need to have that layer of separation, something that movies don’t give. So when I saw this anthology I was ready to beg the publisher for it.

The first story in the anthology is overwritten and felt like a rip off of Kafka (humans turning into giant bugs for no real reason, but also so incredibly dull that it felt like nothing was really happening). So starting weak, then staying pretty eh for a little while. The stories were really hit or miss. The ones that missed tended to be over written and just not scary. The ones that were great were HORRIFYING.

There was one where a woman was cut open while she was alive. She talks about it after, how she could feel every since second of it. The way that everything was described turned my stomach. I LOVED it. The way the “doctors” spoke to her after too, the you are loved comment. It was just horrifying in the best way. It was disgusting physically and emotionally. There were some odd comments about sexuality and genitalia here and there in the story that felt added on for no real reason. It was weird.

Like any anthology, there will be stories that just don’t feel like they belong, some that are significantly better than the rest, and ones that are worth skipping. It took enough stories to get me invested that I ended up taking a star off. I had more misses than hits in the first half which was sad. The ones that turned my stomach will be nightmares for weeks to come though. They carried this anthology.

3 out of 5 stars. I would recommend this book.

You can buy the book here.

~Isaiah