From the Showtime series Yellowjackets to the upcoming Timothée Chalamet film Bones and All to the increasingly unsettling allegations against the actor Armie Hammer, cannibalism is having a moment—in popular culture, anyway.
Literature has long been fascinated with this particular form of savagery, which found an unexpected home in my forthcoming book, The Goddess Effect.
Cannibalism was not at all on my mind when I began the story that evolved into my debut novel. I worked it into the narrative after an early reader observed that the only thing the villain at the center of my wellness satire was guilty of was “arch capitalism.” Looking for a way to make The Goddess Effect more absurd, I delved into a form of barbarity that has captured the imagination of contemporary authors, as well as older and classic writers over the years. Below are eight works of literature that explore cannibalism in manners both overt and discreet.
In her 2020 translation of the epic Old English poem, Headley uses modern slang like “bro” and “stan” to contemporize scenes like the monstrous Grendel’s cannibalism of the people who disrupt his sleep. In her introduction, Headley compares the original text to “Old English freestyle” and “the wedding toast of a drunk uncle.” Her liberties with translation make such chronicles of inhumanity feel all the more cinematic.
Dorothy, the protagonist of this faux memoir of a serial killer-slash-restaurant critic who feasts on the flesh of men, takes pleasure in describing the stomach-churning spoils that have graced her past plates, likening a hunk of a man’s buttocks to “rump roast.” A satire of over-the-top paeans to food, the prose in this novel turned even Summers’s stomach: she told the New York Times that combing over a final version of her manuscript prompted her to go vegan for two weeks.
A master of spinning stories from the profane, Moshfegh weaves cannibalism into her tale of a medieval village on the brink of collapse, writing, perhaps, the most gruesome scene ever involving a pinkie toe. That the village in question is religiously vegetarian makes the act, and the character who commits it, even more depraved.
This coming-of-age story revolves around Natsuki, a disenchanted girl convinced that she’s an alien from another planet. As an adult, Natsuki loses (among other things) her sense of taste, reunites with her cousin, and retreats, along with her husband, to the mountains outside of Tokyo. Without modern conveniences (like the titular staple of Murata’s previous novel, Convenience Store Woman) Natsuki resorts to cannibalism: “Miso Soup with Man” and “Man Simmered in Sweetened Soy Sauce” bring back her sense of taste—and lead her to sink her teeth into her cousin and husband, as well.
Originally published in Spanish in 2017, and translated by Sarah Moses into English in 2020, Agustina Bazterrica’s dystopian novel imagines what the world would look like if the meat factory farms produced were human. A love story is embedded in this graphic repudiation of the industrialization of meat, as is a commentary on the relationship between man and animal.
This darkly funny novel revolves around Seventh Seltzer, a Cannibal American who initially wants nothing to do with his minority identity. With his mother on her deathbed and her dying wish to be consumed by her own children, Seventh and his siblings are forced to reckon with their heritage for reasons sentimental and practical — obeying their mother is the only way for them to receive their inheritance.
This genre-bending tale begins with a history professor in modern Kolkata who is solicited by a “half werewolf” to transcribe a pile of handwritten scrolls. As the professor gets more and more absorbed by the contents of the scrolls, the novel turns into a chronicle of shape-shifting people from centuries ago who regularly engaged in cannibalism, rape, murder, and other barbaric acts.
No round-up of cannibalistic literature would be complete without a mention of Thomas Harris’ 1988 icon of horror fiction, which revolves around the serial killer and human organ gourmand Hannibal Lecter. Immortalized on screen by Anthony Hopkins, the 1991 film version of Lecter took liberties with Harris’s prose. In the book, Lecter recounts eating a victim’s liver with fava beans and a “big Amarone.” Wary that viewers might not be able to identify the Italian wine, the film’s producers changed the line, giving Chianti a reputation that it has yet to live down.
Porn and weddings: two of America’s most beloved forms of sexual fantasy. The former imagines a world where the fucking is both constant and constantly good, while the latter plays out a virginity pageant in which the indelicate deed doesn’t happen at all until marriage. Whether the fetish gear of choice is a white dress or a leather harness, our thirsts for both kinds of wet dream show no signs of abating. COVID sent internet pornography use through the roof as horny people the world over sheltered in place, while the gradual lifting of those same home confinement rules a few months later has positioned 2022 to be the most prolific year in four decades for American nuptials.
Kathleen J. Woods’s novella White Weddingis a psychedelic marriage of these two species of erotic reverie. A nameless woman arrives at a mountainside wedding, uninvited, and serially seduces anyone in her path, from the father of the bride to the caterer. Meanwhile, we slowly learn about the woman’s prior work in a pleasure mansion in the woods, where she fulfilled other women’s highly particular desires. Magic blurs with queer smut and kink as the woman seems to intuit exactly what each of her marks wants in their filthiest, softest heart of hearts—even if they don’t yet know they want it. She would also know exactly what you want. Can you imagine anything hotter? Can you imagine anything more terrifying?
Indeed, those darker body genres, horror and fairytale, are also at play in Woods’s erotica—and they don’t always play nice. From a tender fisting scene on a playground slide to a taxi driver who takes an unusual interest in his fares’ hookup habits, the fantasies in White Wedding push just as hard on the bounds of propriety as they do on those of literary genre. Woods’s interlinked tales are refreshing in their refusal to frame sex either as morally degrading or as intrinsically liberating. In a year when the rights of women, queer, and trans people undergo fresh assaults every week—legal attacks on abortion and on trans children’s access to gender-affirming care being just two recent instances thereof—White Wedding frankly asserts our rights to sex, freedom, and power.
Chelsea Davis: What attracts you to writing porn, as a genre?
Kathleen J. Woods: The pornographic mode was appealing to me because of its potential to not just be academically unsettling or philosophically unsettling, but to be viscerally unsettling to the reader. To enact confusion at the bodily level of the reader; to engage them in a way so that their senses are actually engaged and immersed; to make them discomfited by their own responses to what they’re reading.And also to give them some feeling of being out of reality.
When I was working on White Wedding, I found very useful a book called The Feminist Porn Book, which gives the following definition of feminist porn: “using sexually explicit imagery to contest and complicate dominant representations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class ability, age, body types, and other identity markers. It explores concepts of desire, agency, power, beauty, and pleasure at their most confounding and difficult.” I’ve found this definition to be guiding because it’s quite broad: it doesn’t lay out a specific way that feminist porn must appear, but is instead interested in an unsettling of normative standards of sexuality and in asking probing questions.
CD: Speaking of normative standards of sexuality: as we speak, it’s been less than a week since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Has your book assumed any new significance for you since that court decision?
KW: The writing of the book happened over about seven years. Some of my initial impulses to write about a woman who is divorced from a past but who embodies sexual desire—those came from a world that already had a lot of misogyny and suspicion of overt sexuality. The election of Trump, and the #MeToo movement becoming really widespread, for example; those happened during the writing of the book. So the book already contains cathartic expressions of my anger in response to those events.
But the book has also remained a constant touchstone for me, of trying to ask, “What is a feminine sexuality, a queer sexuality, that isn’t a response to the harms of what the world does to us?” That’s not a question I think is answerable, for myself, outside of fiction.
CD: I think one of the ways your book answers that question is to depict scenes of non-mainstream sexuality with great detail and tenderness. But because of that intense detail (and I don’t say this with any moral judgment, of course), some of the book’s more intense edgeplay scenes were squirm-inducing for me, personally, to read. There’s a scene in the pleasure mansion where the woman pierces a lady’s back with small metal hoops, and another where the woman does a sounding act on the bride’s father, penetrating his urethra.
KW: It wasn’t out of a desire for shock value that I wrote those scenes. I was instead thinking about the different modes of the erotic. Feminine desire (and I’m going to continue using the word “feminine,” here, even acknowledging its limitations as a blanket term) to me does often seem like it centers on fantasies outside of the typical penetrative act. That is, feminine desire is not just for penis-in-vagina sex, which has so often been used to define sex in our Judeo-Christian culture, beginning with the concept of “virginity.”
With the corseting scene, I was also thinking about all the ways in which performing the feminine involves alteration of the body—how there can be a horror in that. So I included a shaving scene and a piercing scene. And it’s not just any back piercing that takes place; it’s a series of piercings in the shape of a corset. Today, corsets evoke a desire for the forbidden: we have more or less concluded that the corsetry of the past was painful and unnecessary for women—yet corseting remains a big part of contemporary kink, as does extreme body modification.
In writing that scene I wanted to make the medium of language as visceral as it would be if you were watching it in a movie or experiencing it in real life. Such that you want it to let up, you want relief—the same way that the girl who’s being corseted by the woman does. Using all five senses in those scenes was important to me, in order to have that penetrated effect on the reader.
CD: Of the five senses, smell is the sense that the reader gains the most access to in this book. On the one hand, there are the odors that accumulate on the woman’s body over the course of her repeated sex acts. But then there are also the odors that she’s constantly noticing in the world, from mulch to fabric softener. I thought your choice to focus on scent was fascinating because it’s so often a collective open secret that sex has a smell, or smells, associated with it. We all know it, yet much erotica doesn’t talk about it beyond a cursory nod to “musk.” I was curious why you chose to deviate from the pornographic norm in that way.
What is a feminine sexuality, a queer sexuality, that isn’t a response to the harms of what the world does to us?
KW: Smell seems to me like one of our most animalistic senses. And we don’t have very much control over our reactions to it—over whether we’re excited by a smell or revolted by it. Smell enters us, penetrates us.
It’s also a sense that the form of fiction, versus a painting or a film, has a unique ability to capture. I mean, I’ve definitely seen smell evoked in film. But it still seems like something that the page had a particular advantage in approaching.
CD: Much of your book takes place in a mysterious pleasure mansion in the woods, where women come to have erotic desires of all stripes fulfilled by the woman in a private room. Elsewhere, you’ve noted that the pleasure mansion is a recurring setting in erotic fiction and film, from Pauline Réage’s novel The Story of O to the video for Beyoncé’s song “Haunted.” We could also add the music video for “WAP” to that list. What do you think is so appealing about the pleasure mansion as a structure of sexual fantasy, perhaps even especially (since those creators I’ve just named are all women) of female erotic fantasy?
KW: There’s something that I find personally true about the vision of desire as a hallway of doors, in which what is behind them is suspected, but unknown. And your own response to what’s behind the doors is also both suspected and unknown. You move through this mysterious space with the agency of movement, with the agency of opening the door, with the agency of walking through and deciding to enter or look into a room—but also with a lack of agency in the sense that you have no control over what’s going to be behind that door.
You see this in so many stories about female curiosity, right? Eros and Psyche; Bluebeard’s wife; Pandora. It feels like an image that comes from our cultural makeup around women’s desire. There’s the thrill of the closed door and the long stretching hallway of what could be there. What could I find, and will it delight me? Will it hurt me? Will it condemn me?
CD: In some ways your book is itself structured like a pleasure mansion itself. The novella consists of a series of interpolated stories, like a hallway of doors each with private fantasies behind them. A character will describe a sexual encounter they’ve had in the past (or perhaps one they would’ve liked to have), which will then infect the listening character with lust, the desire to recall her own real or imagined sex scene. Why did you choose to arrange the book this way, with even more of an emphasis on erotic storytelling than on real-time sex scenes?
KW: One of the themes I was reflecting on a lot as I was approaching this book was the narratives we hear about sex—how we form our own story of what desire should be and what sex looks like through a bunch of different sources. We hear snippets of conversation; there are stories that we inherit from reading books and watching movies; and there are also the stories that we are told by figures in our life. It’s very confusing: you get a lot of contrasting stories. So the storytelling form itself is in question here—how true any of these stories that the Woman tells are.
I also wanted the book to have that feeling of an unsettling of time, of temporality being hazy and a little confused. Because I also think that is part of what is so potentially sometimes liberatory and terrifying about sexual pleasure is that, in moments of orgasm or pleasure, you’re often removed from and out of time. You are fully in the present in a way that is not true (for me, at least) a lot of the time out in the world. You get to exist without a past, without a future for a brief second (or a brief few seconds, or hours, depending on—you know—exactly what’s going on).
As in, you can briefly think, “I still have rights!” Although it’s not a perfect trick. Even during sex recently, “Roe v. Wade” has flashed through my brain.
CD: So even if sex can potentially create a sort of floating shell around you, sometimes the outside world still intrudes.
KW: Yeah. And I think sometimes that intrusive world is from those stories that we hear throughout our lives, too. As in, “I shouldn’t be doing this.” Or “I should hide this part of my body.”
CD: One of my favorite sequences in the book is a four-part Russian nesting doll of stories about just that—how body image concerns can intrude upon women’s experiences of sex. It begins when the bride’s father, Greg, gives a speech at the wedding about the bride’s sexual play with Barbie dolls as a child (every bride’s worst nightmare). And that speech spurs the Woman into telling a story to the bride’s stepsister about two women at a bar, a singer and a bartender. It’s a romance that’s become sexually fraught because the singer is ashamed of the shape of her vulva and is planning to undergo a kind of labiaplasty surgery known as “the Barbie procedure.” Then the Woman shows up and helps the bartender and singer fuck in a playground slide. But in between that frustrated beginning and that cathartic ending, the woman and the bartender tell each other what I think are the novella’s scariest stories. One is about a professor who makes dolls out of little girls’ corpses. And the other is about a father-daughter pair who kidnap and mutilate women together. I was really affected by the mixture of horror and catharsis and liberation throughout the sequence. It was a heady and, as you were saying earlier, confusing thing to encounter as a reader.
I was very tired of the idea that, ‘Oh, a woman is a sexual aggressor because this horrible thing happened to her.’ Is that really our only reason why a woman can be a horny monster?
KW: Some of the pieces of that sequence developed as I experienced and learned about things in the real world. So, for example, while I was writing the book, I was also working separately as a content writer on a contract basis. And I was assigned to help women who were sexual health advocates write a free guide about labiaplasty and its potential harms. So I had to research labiaplasty for many, many, hours, and that’s when I encountered the very real “Barbie procedure.” This is an operation that was developed to make a woman’s vulva look flat and “neat”—“neat” is the word I kept seeing, “tidy,” “clean.” This is a plastic surgery that is solely for the aesthetics of the vulva, even though you lose sensory tissue, and you can also damage the clitoris and clitoral hood. I was not pleased reading about these things. And the book already had some dolls in that scene, and so the Barbie procedure just seemed like an obvious fit.
While I was writing, I also learned about the other stories you mentioned, which are the only other parts of this novella that have some basis in real, true-crime stories—those about the man who made dolls out of the corpses of young girls, and the one about the father and daughter. I think those are the parts of my own narratives I’ve inherited about being a woman in the world. And after I learned about those incidents, I just remember thinking, “Ugh, get out of me, stop being in my head.” So they had to be in the book, I guess, for that reason.
CD: Well, the woman says this really interesting thing of the father-daughter torture team. She says, “They wanted what they wanted and they took it.” Which speaks to the fact that, yes, these people are doing horrific things, but what they’re doing also started as a fantasy, for them. What could be a more literal living out of your own fantasy than making a real human corpse into your fantasy doll?
KW: Yeah, totally. And I also became really interested in the idea that there are always these stories that are trying to break down the psychology of, for example, the man who dug up corpses and made dolls out of them, like, “Oh, he did it because of this. He had this trauma that there’s this reason why he did these things.” And I thought about how a figure like the woman would be pretty uninterested in that reasoning versus the actual act of just grabbing what you want.
CD: Your book doesn’t shy away from depicting sexual trauma, but it also never focuses on trauma as the sole reason that anyone acts in a certain way, sexually or otherwise. It’s a real intervention, given the ubiquity of the term “trauma” in today’s discourse around sex. Was that a conscious choice, on your part, to avoid the language and narrative structures of trauma?
KW: Yeah. As a person, outside my writing, I value conversations around the impacts of sexual trauma. They’re important. But in the world of fiction, in the world of an erotic novel that is moving through pleasure and desire, I was finding myself very weary and tired of the idea that, “Oh, a woman is a sexual aggressor because this horrible thing happened to her.” Is that really our only reason why a woman can be a horny monster? Why can’t she just be the horny monster, you know?
CD: Let’s talk more about her, your central monster-character. Even though the woman’s senses are so finely tuned, and she really takes in the world through her body—is, in some ways, nothing but a body, one that tastes and smells and touches and fucks—she lacks most of the markers of physical character description. We don’t know what color her hair is; we don’t know what her build is. You’ve also labeled her with a prototype instead of a specific name—“the woman.” Why did you choose to make your focalizing character a kind of everywoman in these ways?
You experience the world through your body, but your body is also read by others. Those two things are too interconnected to be separated.
KW: Early on in the writing of this book, one of my graduate thesis advisors, Elisabeth Sheffield, said, “It’s probably intellectually and artistically dishonest to ignore that the woman is passing through this wedding of all these white people so easily that she’s probably white.” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, you can’t write an ‘everywoman.’ That was naive of me.”
And so that is where I became interested in further developing this idea of whiteness throughout the book. You experience the world through your body, but your body is also read by others. Those two things are too interconnected to be separated.
That also brings me back to, what I was talking about with the corset piercing in the mansion, or the erotic shaving scene. These oppressive ideas of what a female body is supposed to look like come from white standards of beauty, specifically. Hairless, thin, all that stuff.
And so the wedding itself just became whiter and whiter as I wrote. It was important to me that it wasn’t divorced of race just because there are only white people there. Whiteness is as racialized as being nonwhite.
CD: This is flagged in the book’s title, of course. “White” is doing a lot of work there.
KW: And it’s not just about the purity fantasy of weddings, which is already disrupted the moment the reader realizes the bride is pregnant. It is also about white, upper-class codes of conduct.
CD: I’m curious about your experience of reading your work in public. Porn is not a shocking thing to encounter in San Francisco (your and my home city) in the year 2022, but the genre definitely still has its associations with taboo in some circles. What’s it like to know that you might be arousing your audience, or even angering or shocking some of them?
KW:: If they’re just angry because it’s porn, that’s not an interesting critique to me, so I don’t worry about it. I’ve mainly gotten feedback from the audience in the vein of, “I was very frightened and aroused.” And I’m like, “Good. Perfect. It worked.”
“Compromisos” by Manuel Muñoz is no longer available to read online, at the Author’s request. The full text can be found in The Consequences by Manuel Muñoz (2022), as well as in the 2023 edition of Best American Short Stories, selected by Min Jin Lee.
Every few months, it seems there is an eruption over cultural appropriation in the literary world. Writers and readers who share an identity take issue with the portrayal of their community by a writer from outside of their community. Fellow writers, especially those from outside of this community come to the defense of this writer, decrying their artistic freedom is in danger from cultural censorship. A raging debate ensues, with writers and thinkers divided between these views. Rinse and repeat. Cultural appropriation is amongst the most fraught social issues in the literary and broader artistic arena and one for which there isn’t always a simple, straightforward answer.
When I was immersed in writing my biography, Poignant Song: The Life and Music of Lakshmi Shankar, I noticed how woefully undiverse the field of biography was, both in terms of authors as well as subjects. As the debate about cultural appropriation raged on, I wondered how it related to writing biographies, stories of other people’s lives. I was an Indian American woman writing the life story of an Indian American woman musician. What did I think of white biographers writing the life story of marginalized subjects? What was gained and lost by this?
I parsed my thoughts about this question in my essay, “Who Gets to Write About Whom: Examining Authority, Authenticity, and Appropriation in Biography.” Although I focused on the field of biography, my exploration applies broadly to nonfiction writing. I observed that issues of authority, authenticity, and appropriation kept bubbling up in the literary realm in terms of “Who is permitted to tell whose story?” and the more specific question “should non-marginalized writers write about marginalized people?” As I note in my piece, these questions seem especially important to biography, “a genre specifically tasked with telling other people’s real-life stories.” But before we answer these questions, we have to acknowledge the context for these questions. The realm of biography has long been biased towards the life stories of white individuals, most often white male figureheads, told by white authors, also most often male. This context is significant because as I state in my essay, it “results in a reinforcement of cultural erasure,” which in turn impacts the way history is told, whose contributions are credited and whose are left out.
When I came to the question of who should be writing the life stories of marginalized individuals, I reflected on my own experiences and observations as a woman of color writer writing the life story of an overlooked woman of color artist. Here are my guiding observations:
First, I believe, in theory, most anyone can write about most anyone else.
Second, if the biographer doesn’t share the same racial, cultural, or other marginalized background as their subject, it is incumbent on the biographer to address this through extensive and immersive research.
Third, in addition, the biographer who does not share identity or experience with their subject must also spend much time and energy reflecting on how their own identity relates to that of their subject and consider how it shapes or colors the lens through which they are viewing their subject’s life. This element, I believe, is most at risk of being absent from biographies by “outside” biographers.
Finally, even with all the research and self-reflection, ultimately, a skilled biographer who shares the same identity or background as the subject will be able to yield certain insights that are unavailable to the biographer who doesn’t share these attributes.
Writers who believe themselves to be objective and colorblind are usually not, and as Paisley Rekdal incisively noted in Appropriate: A Provocation, they are not “prepared to unravel the Gordian knot of social realities, history, and fantasy that constitute a self and its attendant ideas of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or even physical or mental ability.”
Some in the literary world believe writers should keep identity—their subject’s as well as their own—out of the scope of their work. This is falsely framed as being objective but instead is an attempt to mitigate the fact that they do not share an identity, community, and experiences with their subject. I don’t see how an author can plumb the depths of a person’s life story without addressing their identity, even in instances where the subject might not have publicly identified with their identity, which in itself reveals something about them that should be investigated in the telling of their life story. Just as importantly, I don’t believe an author can truly convey a person’s life story without reflecting on how their own identity shapes their approach to telling this story. Who are they relative to their subject? How do/did their respective identities shape their lives? How does their identity affect the way they view their subject’s life, judge their actions? It is crucial to reflect on whether there are power dynamics at play that impact how the writer views their subject and the ways in which this is reflected in the approach to, and writing of, their life story.
As much as I believe just about anyone can write about anyone else, I also believe writers who share an identity, community, and set of experiences are more able to understand the nuances and traits specific to that culture and community in a way that outsiders cannot. No amount of research is guaranteed to provide an outside writer with access to intangible yet indelible elements, as I note in my final observation.
When writing the lives of those from marginalized backgrounds, it’s crucial they are rendered in ways that are well researched, are nuanced and fully embodied, and avoid stereotypes. This cultural sensitivity is a matter of respect for cultural identity but also a matter of good writing craft. When you think of the most compelling stories you have read about people, fictional or nonfictional, those characters are vibrant because they are detailed, fully embodied and nuanced, not rendered with broad strokes or reliant on tired (and possibly biased) stereotypes.
No amount of research is guaranteed to provide an outside writer with access to intangible yet indelible elements.
The farther the writer is from the community they are writing about, the more research they need to do, and this research needs to be immersive. This means that the writer must interrogate their sources of information. Who are the sources of information they are primarily referencing about this community? Are they from within or outside of this community? And in the writer’s vision for their piece, how often will voices from within the community be heard? Is it important to acknowledge that there may be multiple viewpoints within this community?
Writers writing about a subject or community outside of their identity or experience should consider having an individual from within that community who is familiar with the topic read their work to ensure their rendering of the community is accurate and culturally sensitive. Informally, writers who already know each other professionally and personally might do this work as a favor or in exchange for other tasks. However, this has bred a tendency by writers to assume that writers from marginalized communities will do this for free, instead of recognizing that this is, in fact, labor and should be compensated.
In response to the growing recognition of the importance of cultural sensitivity, formal resources and networks of cultural sensitivity readers have developed. Conscious Style Guideis an online resource offering guidance on a host of stylistic issues around identity and other areas. Two networks of sensitivity readers, including Writing Diversely and Writing with Color, list sensitivity readers according to their areas of expertise and services offered. Other useful resources include People of Color in Publishing, Editors of Color Database, and Black Editors & Proofreaders.
Even when writers share a similar background to their subject, it is still important to probe the assumptions shaping their approach to writing about their subject.
In truth, even when writers share a similar background to their subject, it is still important to probe the assumptions shaping their approach to writing about their subject because no identity or community is monolithic. For example, in the South Asian diaspora, caste wields a strong influence even though it often goes unremarked upon. Therefore, a south Asian writer should consider how caste may be at play in the dynamics of a South Asian community they are covering and they should reflect on how their own understanding and experience of caste influences their perceptions and interactions with their subject. Meanwhile, when a Black writer is writing about a Black subject, issues such as class or education can influence their perspective. Similarly, immigrant journalists should be conscious of tendencies of some in the media and in their own communities to harmfully frame documented immigrants as good and deserving and undocumented immigrants as criminal and undeserving.
While cultural insensitivity and cultural appropriation are fraught and complicated issues and the prospect of avoiding them might seem daunting to writers, hopefully, this chapter offers a range of insight and guidance. One key aspect of avoiding cultural insensitivity and appropriation is to make conscious and informed choices about how to depict our subjects, especially if we do not share an identity or community with them. And while there are no guarantees that every reader will accept those choices as culturally sensitive, there is something to be said for taking the issue head on, just as we would any other aspect of craft, thereby demonstrating that others’ humanity takes precedence over our desire for unfettered artistic freedom.
I’ve been wanting to see Jordan Peele’s Nope in theaters for a while now, but I feel uncertain about it. I’ve never been much of a moviegoer, but I make an exception for iconic Black films. I saw Get Out three times when it first released; currently, I have only seen one movie in theaters since shuttered movie houses reopened from their months-long COVID-19 closures. Yet COVID—and its seeming resurgence—isn’t my main concern. It’s the endless mass shootings that have me on edge. What if a shooting happens in our movie theater? That’s happened before. I had suggested our family watch Nope during an upcoming trip to Rehoboth beach, but news of an Indiana mall shooting quickly had me doom scrolling and looking up Delaware’s gun laws. Were they open carry? Does that even matter? Shooting after shooting, reporters and journalists analyze different factors that led to that day’s unnecessary mass casualty. We never seem to ask—why do so many Americans resort to extremist violence as a solution to social, emotional or mental issues? America’s long history of white supremacy is never factored into discussions of rampant mass shootings.
“If you want to know a place, you talk to its history.” This is what Mama Z—a centenarian who has documented the names of every lynching victim in the US—tells detectives looking to unravel a string of murders at the heart of Percival Everett’s most recent novel. The Trees is a genre-defying revenge fantasy masquerading as detective fiction. Set In Money, Mississippi—the location of the infamous lynching of Emmett Till—the sons of Till’s murderers are mysteriously killed. A body resembling Till’s appears at each crime scene. The novel is crude and graphic, yet absurdly funny. I tore through all 308 pages, finishing in just 2 days. With the recent rogue nature of the supreme court—overturning Roe v. Wade, environmental protections and a longstanding gun law—as well as another police murder (RIP, Jayland Walker)—The Trees felt like the perfect read to “celebrate” our nation’s birth. I spent much of this year’s July 4th holiday reading it. The news of yet another shooting, just as I finished the novel, felt especially telling and sickening. Displays of vitriol and destruction couldn’t even be paused for family enjoyment of a national holiday.
The vengeance that dominates The Trees stayed with me after I finished the book. Had Everett crossed a line? Was it too much? By the end of the novel, the carnage extends beyond retribution for the sins of Emmett Til’s murderers or even the Jim Crow South. Across the country there are multiple homicides alongside violent castrations. The avenged are not only Black. An incident in California is the first to show a string of similar murders outside of the south, but instead an unidentifiable Asian male body is left at the crime scene. The dispossessed and exploited had come to claim their due. Everett writes a truly violent spectacle; at times it made me feel deeply uncomfortable. When the detective first sees the scene of Junior Junior Milam’s death, we’re told: “A long length of rusty barbed wire was wrapped several times around his [Junior Junior’s] neck. One of his eyes had been either gouged out or carved out and lay next to his thigh, looking up at him … His pants were undone and pulled down to below his knees. His groin was covered in matted blood, and it looked like his scrotum was missing.” There were several depictions of grotesque lynching scenes. While I am personally squeamish about all violence and prefer to avoid it at all costs—I understand the grave importance of detailing these scenes. Everett wants an eye for an eye or a testicle for a testicle.
Displays of vitriol and destruction couldn’t even be paused for family enjoyment of a national holiday.
Lynchings in the south were spectacles of racial violence and terror; Everett’s fictional replication only scratches the surface. A 2017 report by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror,” describes public spectacle lynchings as “festive community gatherings [where] large crowds of whites watched and participated in the black victims prolonged torture, mutilation, dismemberment and burning at the stake.” Souvenirs from such events could easily be procured such as photographs, pieces of flesh, teeth, fingers and toes. That level of depravity is unfathomable—and yet a tangible part of white America’s 400-plus year reign of terror upon Black Americans.
It is only fitting that Everett envision retribution where white men are tortuously murdered, castrated and their testicles left to sit in the hands of a second racialized body at the murder scene. It is gruesome, yes, but symbolic of a vengeful emasculation, centuries in the making.
This history is directly tied to my family; one I honestly had not thought so much about. Growing up in the NYC metropolitan area, I was fed myths about the north’s colorblind mentality and acceptance of African Americans. When I think of my family’s connection to the South, I usually draw a blank. My family has lived in the NYC area for 100 years. As an adult, I now understand the north is just as complicit in the horrors of slavery, racism and exploitation as the South—northern complicity just looked different. Remember at its peak—in 1730, New York City was only second to Charleston in its population of enslaved persons; they built the city. New York City still has the most segregated school system in the nation, and we watched Eric Garner strangled to death on video in Staten Island. Mama Z tells detectives she “consider[s] police shootings to be lynchings” as we all should. Before Eric Garner there were many others, including Amadou Diallo. New York has never been the safe haven from racial violence we were led to believe it was.
Souvenirs from such events could easily be procured such as photographs, pieces of flesh, teeth, fingers and toes.
My great-grandmother Janie Manley died four years before I was born. I grew up knowing very little about her, except that she came to New York during the great migration from North Carolina not long after the end of World War I. She worked as a domestic for well-off families in the north end of New Rochelle (a suburb just seventeen miles north of NYC). My grandmother fondly referred to her mother as “the sergeant general”; Janie was a woman who “didn’t take no stuff.” Maybe as a young mother, who had lost two earlier daughters as babies, she had to toughen herself for a rough world. As far as my mother could remember, Janie never talked about North Carolina and never went back while my mother was alive. Janie was the first of her siblings to migrate north and the rest–Isabel, Lillian, James and David would follow suit. Even Janie’s mother, Eliza Manley would come north. Eliza, a woman born in the height of the Reconstruction era, 1880, would live out the rest of her life in New York City. My grandmother loved visiting her grandmother in Manhattan. Reading through the EJI report, which, honestly, brought me to tears—I wondered, if my great-grandmother had fled unspeakable violence? Had she seen things that she prayed to forget? For the first time, it occurred to me … economic opportunity may not have been the only factor that pulled my maternal family northward. We may still have family in North Carolina, but we have long since lost touch. I wonder what my great grandmother would say about shootings on the NYC subway or the horrific mass murder in Buffalo.
The most notable and fantastic element of The Trees is the non-existence of white backlash to the ongoing murders. Historically, any kind of racial reckoning in America—particularly the non-violent kind, is met with physical, legislative, political and social counter violence. As Kalli Holloway writes of the response to the summer 2020 protests for George Floyd; “to reestablish unchallenged white dominance, a movement of white resistance or anti-anti-racism is working tirelessly to blot out what it sees as a problematic presence—purging Black folks from democracy by stripping voting rights, erasing Black struggle from history by banning the teaching of slavery and its legacy and prohibiting protests that threaten the white supremacist status quo.” All of that as a response to the demand for justice and equity. I think of the backlash against integration and the national guard escorting Ruby Bridges to school. My own mother was part of the first group of Black students to be bussed and integrated into an all white elementary school in our town. At one point our hometown was known as the Little Rock of the North. While my mother has never mentioned violence while attending elementary school–the north side of our town has talked about secession for years. Realistically, if white Americans were lynched en mass for their abstract culpability in America’s history of racism, it is difficult to imagine that Black and Brown communities wouldn’t immediately suffer counter violence in kind. However, the white America of The Trees is impotent. FBI agents, police officers and other white government officials might curse and say the n-word, but they are powerless to halt the scourge of inexplicable white death.
My own mother was part of the first group of Black students to be bussed and integrated into an all white elementary school in our town.
But perhaps Everett’s interpretation is not so far off from reality. Currently, there are 393 million firearms in the U.S. and nearly fifty-three people are killed a day by a firearm. In 2020, 79% of murders—19,384 involved a firearm. News of mass shootings is endless, and our elected officials are continuously stymied by the gun lobby. The racially motivated shooting in Buffalo tells us that lynchings are no longer the preferred method of racial terror; “such acts of racial barbarity have not been relegated to America’s past, however they are links in an unbroken chain that continue.” Yet, shootings in predominantly white communities like Highland Park on the 4th of July or the Parkland shooting of four years ago mean that white Americans also suffer for America’s lust for violence. Chicago native Tamar Manasseh writes “locals know that Highland Park may as well be a million miles from Chicago’s south side. Some of the wealthiest people, the most expensive real estate and the best schools in the state are there.” Even in my own suburban town, there was a strict divide where violence happened. It was not in the wealthier, whiter north side of town. Or at least, those incidents never made it to the nightly news. But now, America’s love for guns and violence is so pervasive that no one is safe. As a Black woman in Chicago, Tamar was “always aware of the danger [her] family … lived in every minute of every day. It was present as oxygen.” Black mothers have always contended with an ever-present violence both structural and literal. While the kind of gun violence Tamar feared likely was not directly related to racial tension—the reality is that America’s longstanding history of violence endangers us all.
The US is reaping what has long been sewn—from lynchings to mass shootings. The EJI report contends that “avoiding honest conversation about this history [of racial terror and lynching] has undermined our ability to a build a nation where racial justice can be achieved.” I would argue we are undermining not only racial justice but our ability to sustain as a nation. Because we have not reckoned with past violence and brutality baked into the fabric of this country—how can we address the present? We must start connecting the nation’s history of white supremacist violence to mass shootings. The two are not mutually exclusive. The Second Amendment was created at a time when the founding fathers feared rebellions from enslaved Africans and resistance from indigenous people whom they marginalized, oppressed and murdered. Who, now, do Americans feel they must bear arms against? It is an increasing population of people of color and anyone unlucky enough to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. “Many victims of terror lynchings were murdered without being accused of any crime; they were killed for social transgressions or for demanding basic rights or fair treatment.” Emmett Till was brutally murdered for offending a white woman; the idea that he would dare interact with a white woman was his transgression. For Black Americans, our mere existence has always been an encroachment on white America.
Today in the US, anyone can find themselves on the other end of gun violence be it for real or imagined infractions. The acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse exemplifies America’s determination to uphold capricious white supremacist violence. Increasingly, all Americans live in fear of gun violence—a certain zip code, skin color or economic status can’t protect you. White supremacist violence has done the inevitable, becoming so toxic that it’s now eating itself, and in so doing, promises to destroy us all. But maybe I’ll go see Nope anyway; I can’t let white supremacy steal all my joy.
The first movie I saw in theaters was Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. It’s perhaps my earliest memory, I was two years old. My brother, who was three, was afraid of the beast and had to be escorted out of the theater. I, however, was quite taken with the monster. I think about this experience a lot because I’m fairly certain the movie romanticized unhealthy relationship dynamics and instilled false hope of someday being gifted a library, and because of this line delivered via dramatic voiceover: “For who could ever learn to love a beast?”
This question came back to me over the years—usually when one of my friends or I was dating someone beastly, or when I was feeling beastly myself. It came up once again when I set out to write my werewolf book, Such Sharp Teeth. I began to think about body horror and romance, about how often they intersect and why. There’s the element of monstrous desire, but deeper than that, it seems to me at the core of both is control. A loss of control over the body, over the heart. A forced surrender. Inescapable vulnerability.
What could be more terrifying than revealing your true form and hoping to be loved as you are? Or falling in love with someone who might not be as they appear? And love can be transformative, but is that always a good thing—or could it be a very bad thing?
The books on this list blend elements of body horror and romance, both conventionally and unconventionally, with beautifully grim and sometimes gruesome results.
“It is still comforting, of a fashion, to think about my Leah, though such thoughts come attendant on the usual wave of grief that my Leah is not who I have with me now.”
When Miri’s wife Leah finally returns after a deep-sea mission gone awry, it becomes evident that the wife Miri sent to sea is not the same wife who came back. Armfield’s stunning novel explores the glory of falling in love and the devastation of it slipping through your fingers. There are moments of shudder-inducing body horror, but what’s truly scary is reckoning with the fleeting, mysterious nature of love.
“I stand naked, looking at Jude, concentrating on becoming one hundred percent water so that I could slip down the drain and out to sea or at least I could slip down Jude’s wrong pipe and fill his lungs, lovingly washing away every breath he takes.”
In Samantha Hunt’s The Seas, our 19-year-old unnamed protagonist suspects she’s a mermaid. Her father vanished into the sea years ago and left her to pine in a small, sad coastal town. She’s hopelessly in love with a haunted local veteran, Jude, though their bond proves complicated. More poignant and heart-wrenching than horrifying, The Seas is about how grief, loneliness, and love—especially our first love—can alter us forever.
In Alexis Henderson’s deliciously gothic novel, indentured bloodmaids must dedicate themselves to their noble-class mistress or master by providing their blood for consumption. In exchange, they’re rewarded handsomely. When Marion Shaw leaves the slums behind to work as a bloodmaid for Countess Lisavet, she’s enthralled by her extravagant new lifestyle and striking mistress but unable to shake the nagging suspicion that something is amiss. Lisavet soon takes a special interest in Marion, but is it true love, or will Lisavet (literally) bleed Marion dry? There’s some swoony, sultry gothic romance, some dizzying body horror, but perhaps what’s most riveting about the novel is how it ruminates on toxic relationships.
“He did not have to have him. He just had to be near him. It was enough.”
It’s difficult to distill the sprawling brilliance of Violet Kupersmith’s novel, which weaves together multiple narratives across different timelines, seamlessly incorporates folklore, ghosts, and monsters, and explores themes of love and violence and revenge, of identity and colonialism. To save from spoiling anything, I will only say there are several instances where love—pure, genuine love, and selfish love—prove horrifying and/or transformative. It’s sometimes bittersweet, and sometimes downright terrifying.
“…I only want your happiness your happiness and mine ours both please eat you need our strength.”
Molly Pohlig’s inventive novel, set during the Victorian era, centers around 28-year-old spinster Iseult, who is tortured by the bitter ghost of her mother Beatrice. Beatrice died giving birth to Iseult, and now haunts her daughter’s body, constantly uttering cruelties, driving Iseult to self-harm as a coping mechanism. Iseult’s equally cruel father exercises his control by attempting to marry her off—unsuccessfully, until Jacob Vinke enters the picture. Jacob has silver skin, a side-effect of a medical treatment that has made him, like Iseult, undesirable. Will they be two misfits in love? Maybe. But Pohlig’s novel has more to say about the ghosts that roam under our skin and the struggle of taking full possession over our bodies and our fates.
In LaRocca’s gripping novella, two women connect in a chat room in the early 2000s and form an online relationship. Lost, lonely Agnes is quick to fall for the generous and enigmatic Zoe. Their skewed power balance is clear from the start, but how this dynamic plays out is truly shocking. The dread escalates as love turns to obsession, and both physical and emotional boundaries are tested. The conclusion is as heart-rending as it is stomach-turning. This novella delivers on the body horror, but it also captures something specific and profound about the need for connection and the early aughts of the internet.
As most of us grow up under the impression that Frankenstein’s monster is a big green oaf with bolts sticking out of its neck, reading Mary Shelley’s horror classic for the first time can be jarring. The Creature in the novel is a gentle, intelligent soul trapped in a monstrous form, aware his appearance prohibits the love and connection he craves. The Creature’s dilemma taps into the fear that we won’t be embraced and accepted for who we are because of how we look, that our love won’t be reciprocated because of the superficial. It’s the most obliterating intersection of romance and body horror, where the former can’t exist because of the latter. Reanimation and revenge-plot aside, it’s pretty relatable.
in the back of the museum is the oldest room
the door is always shut but unlocked
when you go in no one will stop you
no one else is ever inside
the ceilings are low dark
hushed still air
in the room
a dozen glass boxes
atop a dozen black velvet pedestals
inside each glass box
a specimen of fossilized light
you step closer to the fossils
the room is darker colder
the room itself accommodates no future
the room’s only time is already past
the room is ending ending ending ending
andyou andthelight
andthere are no labels
or titles or descriptions to read
andthere are no names only
the velvet andthe glass
andthe fossils of light perspiring
their memory of burning and
you
the memory you’ve already lit
Pregnancy Poem
I am two prophets / I am the space between bones / melted as cheese
/ I am more / but less individual / I am not sorry enough / with my
cupped hands / I am a bucket everyone asks / is that a bucket / I am
sick with questions / I am moonstupid / I am water and mineral / and
mucus and the angriest hair / I am more wounded than ever / I am
giant sadness / I am a raw planet / I am a swollen arrow / I worry the
air
The VHS tapes waited inside a small pull-out cabinet: Frankenstein. Dracula. The Mummy. The Wolf Man. All of these movies had been recorded off Syfy. Early ’90s Sci-Fi Channel, as it was then spelled, was a television treasure. It was dark, it was scary, and to my child’s mind it seemed to reveal the hidden world of unspeakable truths I felt sure existed. Even the channel itself was a secret. Growing up in a working-class family in rural Appalachia, we didn’t always have easy access to nonlocal channels.
My home, like the community around it, was a deeply conservative and religious one. Long before I knew what they thought of queerness, I knew that many in our community, including some of my own family members, believed horror movies were of the devil. The act of watching one opened the viewer up to demonic entities, even Satan himself. That belief makes some warped sense back home, where geographic connections to heaven and hell seem possible. The skies in the mountains are like none I’ve ever seen elsewhere. Looking out in the morning or after a storm, you can see smoke-thick fog rising out of the trees in long plumes to touch the clouds. Valleys and hollows are deep enough, but deeper still are the abandoned mines and runoff lakes that we used to use as playgrounds, both of which have poisoned the dirt and water around them. Pet Sematary doesn’t sound all that unrealistic there. Christian fears of witchcraft coexist with regional folk magic. Phenomena that can only be described as Weird Shit happen all the time, and even many local skeptics believe they’ve personally experienced something that conventional science can’t explain. Sights of unholy form and violence might seem just as likely to open up supernatural contact as staring too long down into one of those howling sulfur-smelling mine shafts.
My father was an anomaly. While he did believe that contemporary, gory horror was wicked, the classics were safe. His only child was allowed to rummage through those tapes freely, and the only movie I was forbidden to watch was, for reasons I never understood, Christine, John Carpenter’s 1983 adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about a killer car.
As a small child, I loved all of the old Universal movies, but it was The Wolf Man, director George Waggner and writer Curt Siodmak’s take on the werewolf, that most captured my heart. The fog rolling over the Welsh countryside in the film reminded me of the fog that embraced our hills. The danger of being caught out at night in the woods where dangerous creatures roam was deliciously familiar. Larry Talbot was kind of an oaf, but he seemed predestined to do wrong, and I pitied him as his life spiraled out of control and he became the monster of the town’s nightmares.
Werewolves have always fascinated me. They combine two of my favorite elements in horror: the monster and grotesque bodily transformations. Walking on two legs and still wearing clothes, Larry Talbot’s werewolf was both man and monster. His transformation into the eponymous creature, though perhaps now low-quality in its cheesy dissolves, slowly strips away his identity to replace familiar human flesh with the fur, claws, and teeth of a creature that defies all norms and violates the rules of what makes a good person. Rather than appearing as simply an animal, Larry embodies the Other. The film emphasizes the ability of a monster to lurk inside a seemingly good man in the poem repeated throughout it: “Even a man who is pure of heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.” The real horror in the film isn’t really Larry’s attacks on townspeople but his own monstrosity.
Long before I knew what they thought of queerness, I knew that many in our community believed horror movies were of the devil.
By the end of first grade, I was already a Weird Kid, the kind that horror often attracts. Painfully introverted, bookish, constantly afraid I was the butt of some larger joke everyone else was in on—but also drawn to dark things. I scared my cousins with my own made-up horror stories and got into trouble for it. With the Satanic Panic still fresh in their memories, the grownups seemed to pride themselves on warning me about the dangers that lurked around every corner, waiting to prey on little girls. I didn’t tell them I’d already learned that lesson. I kept quiet partly from humiliation, but also partly because I wanted to protect their innocence. For their own safety, I let them think the monsters on my tapes were the only monsters I knew about.
There’s a greatly mistaken belief that there are no queer people in Appalachia. Let me assure you: there are plenty. Their existence has historically been a quiet one: obscure bars and gathering places, gender nonconforming relatives, men who are “funny but mean well,” stony, unmarried women with lifelong “friends.” Appalachia is simultaneously a terrifying and beautiful place to be queer, and it is also contradictory. There’s a deep sense of danger that being outed could mean the end of one’s livelihood or life altogether, yet amid that danger there’s a solace in the cultural value of being left to one’s own business. The bonds of queer community are hard-won there, but they’re strong, or at least stronger than those I’ve experienced elsewhere, including New York. Outside the hypercompetitive metropolitan world I now live in, where financial, social, and cultural capital often dictate even casual friendships, Appalachian queers seem to recognize each other as partners in the same fight despite our individual differences.
With increased attention to queer issues on the news in the ’90s, our churches and families had to actually talk about queerness, and many did so with disgust they learned from conservative media. Ironically, although it would be a few more years before I linked werewolves to lesbianism, I became consciously aware of the word lesbian as a source of horror from a news report about a fatal dog attack. The woman’s death was, I was told, justice for her crime against God. She was in hell now, but her surviving girlfriend might yet be saved if she repented. God was merciful, after all.
The real horror in the film isn’t really Larry’s attacks on townspeople but his own monstrosity.
One Halloween night, my cousins and I ran ahead of our parents as we trick or treated. We’d been going door-to-door, but the Dads shouted for us to stop as we crossed onto one home’s lawn. The porch and interior lights were on, the universal signal that trick or treaters are welcome. But catching up with stern, worried faces, the Dads explained to us that lesbians lived in that house. By this point, I had a much more detailed image of what a lesbian was. In the religious tracts that our parents kept in their Bibles, lesbians were ugly, unlovable women, God-haters, predators, child abusers, every bit as perverse as gay men were thought to be. Who knew what they’d done to the candy they handed out to innocent children that night?
As the Dads led us away from the house, I felt as if I’d been the one to do something wrong. But I also hoped those women hadn’t seen us kids coming through their lawn, hadn’t noticed that we never rang their doorbell.
My father was still my connection to horror even after I’d memorized every image and line of every film in the VHS cabinet. He spent many days away from home hauling freight across the country, then he’d come in off the road, shower, and sleep. Like his own father, he was a disciplinarian with a soft side except where sin was concerned. But Friday nights brought out the best in him as we’d sit in the bedroom, where my parents kept a smaller TV, and watch The X-Files.
[In rural Appalachia,] Christian fears of witchcraft coexist with regional folk magic. Phenomena that can only be described as Weird Shit happen all the time.
Stories of filial piety compromised by the son’s shameful otherness have always resonated with me. The figure of the son is key to that resonance some how. My relationship to this figure clearly owes something to Biblical roles of sons, as well as to pop culture’s typical recognition of shameful Otherness in queer men’s narratives while not-always-but-often presenting only a watered-down acknowledgement of those feelings in queer women. It may also owe something to the fact that most of my friends in the teen years of queer realization were queer boys, who treated me as if there were no difference between us. Yet, even those explanations are inadequate. There’s some kind of truth to that role, and any attempt I could make to codify it is certain to become a complicated mess with disclaimers, footnotes, a song lyric, a collection of images sans context. But there would be no comfortable answers, and certainly no easy ones.
Maybe it would have been different if I’d seen Dracula’s Daughter first. But I didn’t find this gem until college, and so, when I think of my father, I think not of the Count’s sapphic daughter but of the Talbot son.
The conflict of The Wolf Man isn’t just between Larry and himself as he becomes a werewolf, knowing that he can’t resist the monster lurking in his own body, but rather between Larry and his father. Portrayed by Claude Rains, Sir John Talbot represents the elitist traditions from which Larry has fled. He speaks with a crisp British accent and comports himself with poise. Larry, meanwhile, is an American whose speech and movement convey a sense of leisure. He is a large man. Compared to his father’s physical slightness, he almost appears as a naive, graceless giant. Yet they do love each other. As the townspeople realize that Larry is the werewolf that haunts the woods at night, Sir John insists that his son suffers from delusions. To him, Larry is sick, under a pagan influence, but curable and certainly not a monster.
I was a Christian, a model student, a Good Girl. I couldn’t be a monster.
At a family barbecue when I was thirteen, the adults sat on the porch and shared their disgust over two women, clearly a couple, who had been in a doctor’s waiting room with me and my parents earlier that day. I’d recently had the surgery that would leave me permanently hard of hearing, but I was still close enough to hear every word the adults said about the couple. They were sinners, monsters, surely a sign that the End Times were upon us. But I’d felt something for those women—not longing or admiration but a fascinated comfort. One woman’s hair was dyed in a black-and-blond pattern I’d never seen before, and the other was called “Daddy” by their son. In the waiting room, I wanted to sit closer to them.
As host of the barbecue, my father put an end to the talk. “I’m disgusted by it,” he said—it now going beyond the lesbian couple to include all queer people. “And I know everyone here is too.”
I wasn’t sure if the kids counted in that “everyone here,” but my heart fell into my stomach when he said it. I wasn’t like those women. I couldn’t be. I’d already had boyfriends. I hated kissing them, hated the way their tongues poked into my mouth, hated the way their hands felt on my skin, but I was a Christian, a model student, a Good Girl. I couldn’t be a monster. But some thing in me was disgusting, and I begged God to take it from me. Within a year, that feeling in my stomach developed into a chronic pain like a fist squeezing my guts every time I felt anxious.
I also met a girl. The girl.
There is something especially visceral about the werewolf’s violence. The vampire’s bite, at least, looks erotic. The werewolf, though—it doesn’t just want a taste or to remake you as its immortal companion. It wants to tear you apart. Lacking any semblance of human morals or even social codes, the transformed werewolf has no compunctions about killing its victims. And unlike the vampire, the werewolf doesn’t need to kill to survive. But it does. And so the werewolf is irredeemable.
If I looked at [a girl] too long, I could feel the last threads connecting my soul, God, and my family coming unstitched.
The first werewolf of The Wolf Man isn’t Larry Talbot but the fortune teller Bela (portrayed, no less, by Bela Lugosi). Bela looks into Jenny’s palm and sees the pentagram, the in-film sign of the werewolf and a symbol deeply feared within my family. He knows the wolf inside him will want her. Rather than act on the wolf’s desire by allowing her to linger, thus ensuring she is nearby when he transforms, Bela begs her to flee. As she obeys, the camera lingers on Bela, who looks horrified at his own existence—and still attacks her moments later.
His horror is repeated in Larry. The aloof irreverence that so separates Larry from the stuffy old townspeople disappears as he realizes that not only is he a monster but that his condition can’t be reversed no matter what he does. For the rest of the film, his brash American cheer is replaced by depression.
Bela’s mother, Maleva, is the only person who offers Larry real help. Larry watches her deliver a benediction over Bela’s coffin that absolves the werewolf of blame for his own condition. She alone understands that the werewolf isn’t evil. She alone recognizes her son’s and Larry’s suffering under the weight of their own monstrosity. When Larry is caught in a trap, she repeats her benediction and temporarily restores him to his human form. But she can’t offer him any more help. His face is a picture of wild terror as he hears hunting dogs drawing closer. If he is caught, he and Maleva both know, his condition means his death.
Unlike the vampire, who retains enough human consciousness to enjoy the sensations of their new existence, the werewolf has no control over their own body once transformed. Just as they are bitten without consent, werewolves change and succumb to violent animal instincts without any autonomy at all. Despite his masculine posturing and American bravado, Larry is clearly traumatized by being bitten, and his transformations continue to use his own body against him.
To this day, my sexuality remains unspoken between [my father and I]. I pretend most of my daily life doesn’t even exist.
I’m old enough and, as an academic, steeped enough in theory to recognize a link between my love for horror, my sexuality, and my trauma. All of it combines in the werewolf and, in my first favorite movie, in Larry Talbot’s growing awareness of his nature and betrayal by his own body. Without knowing what I was angry at, my church taught me that my anger was a sin. But horror gave me a power to reckon with what happened and with my increasing difference. In those monsters, even those who weren’t as sympathetic as Larry Talbot, I found people and creatures like me. A product of Appalachia himself, Pumpkinhead seemed more like a faithful companion than a demon. Chucky gave me nightmares, but these were somehow more comfortable than many other social interactions. Every year at Halloween, a family near Main Street dressed up as famous horror characters to scare trick or treaters. My cousins screamed when the man dressed as Freddy Krueger moved his knife-fingered glove toward them, but I loved him. I’d stand on the dark wooden porch while candy was being dispensed and stare at him, daring him to move, waiting for that thrill. The irony of liking a child predator isn’t lost on me, but back then, Freddy seemed to be just another one of those dark things to which I felt a kinship. Monsters, not heroes, were my friends.
What did terrify me was myself. In my teens it was the slow sense of separation from God and my parents, the mounting interest in girls who were soft and pretty, girls who looked more like boys, girls who were new and looked lost in the hallways at school, girls who made sure their underwear showed through their gym clothes, girls from homes surrounded by junkyards, girls from the backwoods who cursed and wore dirty boots. If I looked at one too long, I could feel the last threads connecting my soul, God, and my family coming unstitched.
At the end of The Wolf Man, Larry is killed by his own father. Sir John doesn’t know the werewolf he beats to death is Larry until it is too late and he sees the monstrous body transform back into that of his son. He looks at the dead Larry and then the murder weapon—Larry’s own cane—with horror. Though Larry is much larger than his father, his death makes him appear smaller and vulnerable. Sir John sees that his son was indeed the monster terrorizing the countryside, but, rather than recoiling from him, kneels beside his son’s body and strokes his face.
My father and I don’t talk much anymore. I’ve moved several hundred miles away and he’s in poor health. He only rarely mentions old horror movies and The X-Files when I visit, but we haven’t watched either together in over a decade. Instead of classic horror, his choice of entertainment now is right-wing religious conspiracy theories, pro-Trump videos narrated by uncanny automated voices, and evangelical sermons on YouTube. He speaks constantly of the end times. He waits for the Rapture, for Jesus to come take His children away from the evils of this sinful world. Whenever we do speak, he reminds me of the need to get right with the Lord so I won’t be left behind. It would be easy to ascribe this to political antagonism, but he means it. He genuinely wants his family to be with him in eternity in a celestial land where there are no monsters.
Ever fearing that I’d turn out to be a lesbian, my mother warned me once that if I was one, to “never to tell Daddy because it would break his heart.” So, I never told him the truth about the girl who stepped out into the hallway while I was skipping world history. Her face still had smears of pale makeup from a scene she’d been doing in drama class. She wore red eyeliner. She told me she’d played Dracula.
My father knows her, but doesn’t know who she was to me then or who she still is now. To this day, my sexuality remains unspoken between us. I pretend most of my daily life doesn’t even exist. Sometimes I think he must know and that he simply doesn’t acknowledge it because doing so would mean admitting that his only child is bound for hell. Sometimes I think he knows there’s something different about me, the same way other members of our community always seemed to, but can’t identify it because surely a girl who elected baptism at only five years old couldn’t be so sinful.
Recently, the woman who used to be the girl who played Dracula asked me what my favorite part of The Wolf Man is. I told her it’s Larry’s first transformation and night as a wolf, but my second choice is that last moment between Larry and Sir John, when Larry is revealed as both man and monster—and, still, a son. It’s not a happy ending, but it’s a damn good one.
Angie Cruz’s latest novel How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water is a study of a class of forgotten women: the 55 to 65-year-olds who lost their jobs during the Great Recession and were never able to regain long-term employment.
Cara Romero is one of these women. When the factory where Cara has worked for decades closes in 2007, she participates in a Senior Workforce Program through which participants receive unemployment benefits to subsidize prevocational training. Cara, nervous about the unfamiliar interview processes and concerned about her precarious financial circumstances, appropriates her job counseling sessions (12 of them in total) to talk about her life in Washington Heights. She touches on every aspect of her life, from gentrification’s effects on the residents in her building, to her estranged son and her relationships with her sister, mother, and neighbors. While the entire novel takes place in the offices of the job placement agency, Cara’s voice is the only one that readers hear.
Cruz deftly uses the artifacts of Cara’s life—job and citizen application forms, debt collection notices, rental agreements and invoices—to highlight the issues an immigrant like Cara must navigate and how documents like these can also hinder progress.
Cruz, who played the role of language and cultural translator for her family, spoke to me about these cultural barriers and the impact of the Great Recession on immigrant communities.
Donna Hemans: The book is set during the Great Recession, but coming out of COVID, it could very well be set in present day, couldn’t it? Has anything changed since the Great Recession to now?
Angie Cruz: When I started this book, we weren’t in a recession and now it seems like everyone’s talking about a possible recession and inflation. With COVID, it was the high job unemployment. It’s funny how a book suddenly falls into its time.
A lot of women in my life, like my mother, my grandmother, my aunt, all lost their jobs in 2007, 2008 during the Great Recession. And they all had jobs for over 25 years. The economy did have a big boost after the recession and when Obama was president, but a huge percentage of working-class immigrant women in New York City who were between the age of 55 and 65 and who lost their jobs during the Great Recession never returned to long-term employment. And this is probably because of language, the digital divide, but it was interesting.
DH: Reading your novel in the midst of conversations in the media about student loan forgiveness, the predatory nature of student loans and rental agreements was quite interesting. There were so many parallels, so many systems that prevented Cara and the other immigrant women from getting ahead. Were you drawing from your own experiences, stories you heard?
AC: As a daughter of an immigrant who was born in a working class family, some times with a mixed documentation status family, moving through the system and trying to understand what our rights are, getting an apartment or getting a passport or citizenship or green card or workers’ rights—I was the translator for a lot of my family members. Not only a translator of language but cultural translator. I would say that, yes, this book is greatly informed by that experience and how difficult it is to move through these systems that are difficult to understand, even for those that are educated in this country.
There is an expression by Toni Morrison where she says something about the galaxy of a woman. She’s speaking about one of her characters; I think it’s Sula: how you get the galaxy of a Black woman is by adding all the different facets of their lives that are often unseen.
While Cara was telling her story, these forms and the documents work also as a counter narrative to some of the things she’s saying to show the complexity of the situation she is in. So even if she’s really optimistic, we understand that the system is not always generous.
DH:And there was also the language barrier as well reflected in the way Cara answers some of the security questions.
AC: Well, language is always a way in and a way that also keeps you out. In the book, I was making fun also of the system itself and these security questions that ask you something that is impossible to answer because you didn’t grow up in this culture. I thought that it would be satirical to have a character address these questions candidly and playfully. Also to show that you’ve lost even before you’ve begun the process.
DH:I read recently that conversations about debt are always about more than money. And I think that’s the case here, isn’t it?
AC: James Baldwin says it’s expensive to be poor. And this has always felt true to me. When you don’t have any generational wealth, or cultural capital, or anyone in your family to lean on, even if it seems like you’re progressing in a certain way, you’re always in some kind of debt. And I wanted to show that regardless of how hard working so many of these characters are in the book, the hustle is forever because there’s no real way to get out of poverty or money insecurity or housing insecurity when you’re in an extended network of people that are also in trouble in that way. Unless you turn your back on them, maybe. But it’s also an impossible thing, because then you would have familial poverty, emotional poverty and spiritual poverty. And I guess the wealth that I’m trying to center is that even if one is in financial debt, there’s an incredible wealth in having a community that’s taking care of you.
DH: Right. There was so much of that in the way in which Cara was devoted to her neighbors, even rejecting certain jobs because those would interfere with her taking care of the elderly people in her neighborhood. Cara takes care of everyone. Underneath all of her devotion to others is the burning question: who will take care of me? I thought that was a pointed question because it speaks to the unique experience of immigrants or people who have moved away from home. Is that the way you look at it?
AC: Exactly. I grew up in a home where the strong women, despite all the microaggressions they were experiencing, despite all the challenges, still showed up to work. You could put so much on a person and still they get up in the morning and they do this impossible thing every day.
I grew up in a home where the strong women, despite all the challenges, still showed up to work.
I feel like that is actually quite detrimental. Not that it shouldn’t be celebrated, that someone is able to feed their family and pay their rent, but to think always that the strength is one of resilience is also debilitating for so many women that I know and I wanted to kind of show the heaviness of that work, and that it shouldn’t be just one person’s work. It should be everybody’s work to take care of everyone. Cara Romero is “I am strong, I am able to do all these things. I don’t even need anyone to come with me to the doctor when I have surgery. I will never ask for help.” What are we teaching our daughters or sisters or cousins if we always pretend that we don’t need anybody? The truth is we all need somebody and I wanted to illustrate that too. Like, even if there is strength in doing certain kinds of things the celebration of resilience is also killing us.
DH: Talking about relationships, Cara says that she’s learned the difficult way that you have to be gentle with your children or you can lose them forever. In part, it’s an extension of her continuing again to try to do too much. But tell us about her relationship with her son and how you see that relationship fitting in with all the other things that are going on in her life.
AC: Cara loves her son deeply but is estranged from him because he’s not the son that she had hoped to have or doesn’t really understand what’s possible with a son who is not performing the patriarchal macho culture that she understands is masculinity. Because she wants him to survive, she disciplines him in a way that actually pushes him away, possibly forever, we don’t know. I’m really interested in talking about the ways that corporal punishment plays into the family. These kinds of abuses are intergenerational and often socially accepted. I want to show the kind of tension between her sister, Angela, and Cara and how to raise a child without that kind of violence.
I also wanted to show that even though she rejects her son, because he may be queer—it’s not said explicitly in the book—the contradiction is that she’s taking care of her queer neighbors. So you have this contradiction of a mother who is saying one thing, but in truth, she’s still generously taking care of the people around her despite their lifestyles.
DH: The entire story takes place in the offices of a job placement agency, but it’s as much about personal relationships—both community and familial—as it is about gentrification and way systems are sometimes stacked against people. Were you playing with the differences between being in community with people and just being part of a larger community of services and systems.
What are we teaching our daughters or sisters or cousins if we always pretend that we don’t need anybody? The truth is we all need somebody.
AC: I see this as a common thread among a lot of different immigrant groups where we come from cultures that celebrate and lean into interdependence. But then we enter a system in the United States that supports largely the culture of the nuclear family and the individual. In some ways, what’s happening between these characters is that they come in to a culture that is all about you first. If you don’t succeed, you’re totally responsible for your failure. And if you win, you celebrate because you are an exception and wonderful and brilliant. But in a culture of interdependence, when one person wins, everybody wins.
The statistics show that it’s almost impossible to go from working class to middle class to upper class. But there are exceptions. So when I think about the bigger community, the nation and the systems and the laws and the Constitution and the way all that works, and then our interpersonal communities, there is a real tension between the way we move in the world.
DH: Is the outcome for Cara a positive one?
AC: What is an optimistic, positive outcome has so much to do with what you value. Realistically if you think success is that Cara finds a job, statistically that wasn’t what happened for many women. Many women ended up doing gigs like babysitting or moving back to their home countries trying to figure out a way to survive. But if you think optimistically about what is the richness of a life, what I continue to believe is Cara continues to do what she is doing. Even if she is unemployed, she has been employed by the community.
Sometimes the only way to approach history, particularly a history that has excluded you or one which you felt trapped inside, is to deface it. Defacing—like a form of graffiti—can take the form of literally writing or collaging on top of the record so that your words are visible, but so is the history you are reinscribing. The two interact to create a third space. Similarly, sometimes when going in search of a specific history, you can’t help but research your own. Your history creates another layer to the original, adding to it and permanently altering the way it will be understood or interpreted by others.
In my debut essay collection, Curing Season, I contend with the history of a county in eastern North Carolina where I moved when I was ten years old and to which I desperately wanted to belong—hello, adolescence!—but I could not find a space for myself. As an adult, obsessed with the county’s book of self-submitted family histories, I approached it as an opportunity to write my own history—on top of theirs.
Nonfiction books leaning against the borders of the genre—which is to say, in that expansive and exciting category called “experimental nonfiction”—continue to illustrate the ways we can work with history while including our own narratives. No one flinches when fiction alters, reshapes, or dismantles historically-agreed-upon narratives. But there are also some incredible experimental nonfiction books doing the work of defacing history, sometimes in a very visceral and visual way, by scratching off the paint, keeping the ghostly outline of what came before, and then making history anew.
The Bear Womanby Karolina Ramqvist, translated by Saskia Vogel
The Bear Woman traces the legend of Marguerite de La Rocque, a 14th-century French noblewoman who was taken to North America and, as punishment for a love affair on the voyage over, abandoned on an island in the St. Lawrence River—a fascinating tale on its own. But Ramqvist’s own motherhood and womanhood are interwoven atop and between Ramqvist’s discoveries (and dead ends) as she combs the brittle archives to learn more about Marguerite, reflecting on how much control a woman has historically not had about the legends of her own life. Ramqvist notes that each person who recorded the details of Marguerite’s story had “their own motives for why they had chosen to tell her story at all, and for how they told it,” acknowledging that she herself must imagine into Marguerite’s narrative as Ramqvist navigates the stormy channel between what is her projection and what is her unveiling of Marguerite’s truth.
A Ghost in the Throat also imagines into a legend grounded in history: “The Keen for Art Ó Laoghaire,” a poem written by the 18th century Irish poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill about the death of her husband Art. Dubh—who was pregnant at the time of Art’s death and was raising a young family—parallels Doireann Ní Gríofa, who reencounters Dubh’s poem when she is a young mother herself. Ní Gríofa becomes obsessed with discovering more about Eibhlín Dubh’s life, excavating birth records, hospital records, cemeteries and newspapers, trying to find out what became of Dubh. A poet like Dubh, Ní Gríofa seeks history to reconstruct Eibhlín Dubh’s life and finds herself constructing her own.
Megan Culhane Galbraith is an adoptee whose early history was obscured from her for most of her life. The subtitle of The Guild of the Infant Saviour is “An Adopted Child’s Memory Book,” and like memory itself, the book is truth presented with gaps and alterations. Photographs from the author’s childhood are displayed at the ends of chapters alongside images of those photographs which were recreated by the author, using dolls as stand-ins for herself, as well as the inclusion of images stating “permission not granted.” The process of comparing the created and original images mimics the creation of memory, the re-creation of memory, and the reclamation of both fact and memory. Galbraith’s book starts a fascinating conversation about permission, excision, and the shaping of narrative based on what a nonfiction writer must fabricate in her own book to placate others.
Letter to a Future Lover is centered around other peoples’ history. Ander Monson takes the marginalia and tucked-paper-notes left inside found books and writes around what—and who—he finds. A historical trail has been left behind, but Monson makes new meanings from the artifacts through what he himself brings to the marginalia. Is his interpretation accurate? Does it matter? How much respect is one required to give to graffiti, anyway? Letter to a Future Lover is the ultimate history defacer as it both narrates the defacing others have done, but also leaves a layer of its own.
The Witch of Eye turns its gaze on the witches of history and the multiplicity of narratives about their experiences which nearly always drained into one gutter: the official witch trial court transcriptions. Kathryn Nuernberger reminds us that the women’s forced confessions and shouted-down explanations have become the only “historical” records, but in refusing to accept the voice of a predominantly white male justice system as the singular truth, Nuernberger uses her own experiences—along with contemporary court cases—to offer a voice to those women who also longed to deface the historical record but were not permitted to speak.
Evidence of V culls together erased-and-partial documentation from the 1930s on the little-known practice of incarcerating teenage girls for the crime of “immorality” so that Sheila O’Connor can imagine into the slim case file kept on record for her grandmother, who was one of those incarcerated girls. I’m obsessed with how flexible O’Connor makes facts, how insistently she reminds the reader that documentation is never complete, how many voices are erased even as they are “recorded” by others. Evidence of V is a wildly exciting addition for the nonfiction/hybrid genre as it blurs facts into recorded fictions and reverses fiction into the closest we can get, sometimes, to facts.
Litany for the Long Moment blurs the edges around Mary-Kim Arnold’s adoption from Korea at age two with the twin thumbs of grief and trauma. The memoir is reminiscent of Galbraith’s book as both authors use photographs as a form of evidence to claim facts around their adoptions. Arnold accrues additional sources, like Korean language worksheets and original letters from her social worker, before layering them beside meditations on the work of photographer Francesca Woodman and Korean American artists like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha to question history’s other layer of truth: the one people in diaspora must build for themselves.
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