Women are writing absolutely horrific novels. Women are writing novels about people (usually women, usually young) who stalk, slash, bludgeon, infect, slice, dismember and cannibalise. Recent additions to the literary subgenre some have termed “femgore” – ultraviolent body-horror by female writers – include EK Sathue’s Youthjuice and The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim. In the autumn, Of the Flesh will be published, a new anthology of “modern horror stories” from authors including Evie Wyld, Lionel Shriver and Susan Barker.
The boom in mainstream body-horror novels written by and explicitly marketed to women could probably be loosely dated to the beginning of the decade, and the publication of Mona Awad’s splenetic campus satire, Bunny. Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts, promoted by critics as “American Psycho for girls” with patronising regularity, followed not long after. Both novels achieved huge commercial success and were early case studies in the power of BookTok to drive sales.
The most dependable augury of the birth of a new publishing micro-trend is the visual vocabulary of book covers, and four years post-Bunny, the “femgore cover” has at last hypostatised: neon pinks, glistening eyeballs, ambiguously truncated body parts in grayscale and flowers unfurling into hunks of raw meat. With its break into the mainstream, we may have reached the tipping point where body-horror begins – oh, so aptly – to eat itself, becoming, in the formulation of literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic”. Already, we’re seeing the beginnings of something like a critical pushback. In a piece for Lit Hub last year, Molly Odintz identified this new wave of literary “Patricia Batemans”, asking: “Are they battling the patriarchy, or are they symptoms of it? Is a serial killer a rebel, or the new pick-me girl?” Just last month, Dazed Digital’s Natalie Wall noted “the sickly rise of twee misandry” in novels, where any postfeminist nous “is obscured by shallow aesthetics”.
But was femgore subversive to begin with? It is certainly feels like a reaction to one aspect of the pop-cultural milieu of the 2000s, in which its overwhelmingly millennial cohort of authors (and I) came of age: the ubiquity of the “torture porn” franchise. Hyperviolent horror films, such as Hostel, Captivity and House of Wax, hybridised the more satirical splatter and slasher flicks of the 90s into something more earnestly sinister. These films often reserve the most extravagant brutalities and graphic mutilation for female victims – the more pneumatically hot, the better. Elisha Cuthbert was dining out for a decade on being annihilated by psychopaths. Almost all femgore novels reference the aesthetics motifs of blockbuster horror more or less knowingly, and might superficially appear to function as a straightforward cultural corrective to torture porn’s misogynistic excess: here, the beautiful young woman is no longer inflicted upon, but inflicting, and with all the zest of her male antecedents.
The backlash against torture-porn movies, and the provocative media campaigns often used to promote them, was pronounced, even at the time. But their enormous popularity was undeniable among a generation desensitised by some queasy mixture of – to pluck three horrible things at random out of the decade’s throbbing cultural stew – Jackass, the Abu Ghraib photographs and Robbie Williams tearing his skin off in the post-watershed version of the Rock DJ video. The lack of equivalence between these almost historical artefacts is pertinent: exposure to graphic images of the very real atrocities carried out during globalised, mechanised wars alongside images of artificial violence has become one of the defining dissonances of life as a digital native. One of the most interesting horror writers working now is Alison Rumfitt, whose truly transgressive second novel, Brainwyrms, explores online radicalisation and political conspiracy through the metaphor of parasitism in prose that lurches from depravity to depravity with the frenetically numbing pace of scrolling an X feed or flicking between 24-hour news channels. Meanwhile, EK Sathue’s Youthjuice and Mona Awad’s Rouge send up the cultish consumerism of the beauty industry, now augmented by social media, with a sort of Grand Guignol absurdity.
For horror fans, the genre often promises a kind of catharsis – a simulated terror from which the viewer, or reader, will ultimately emerge unscathed. Most women move through the world with a conditioned hyperawareness of their vulnerability to all kinds of violence, and this gives horror media a complicated appeal. As the novelist and academic Susannah Dickey – whose debut poetry collection, ISDAL, interrogates the popularity of the true-crime media – puts it: “a false sense of agency over one’s mind and body, especially when it comes to the negative affects that arise from often feeling bodily unsafe, is a comforting one.” Sexual violence, threatened or actualised, is present in nearly all femgore novels, and often serves as a catalyst for the protagonist’s vengeful brutality. Because of this, the novels’ popularity is often linked to the #MeToo movement, and heightened cultural awareness of the pervasiveness of violence against women and girls. But to read the femgore novel as a sort of narrative panacea to the traumas of real-world sexual violence is to ignore the complex and equivocal view they can offer of the networks of power in which violence takes place, and their meta-literary commentary on the aesthetic traditions of horror.
Speaking to the Guardian in 2021 about her arthouse slasher film Titane, French director Julia Ducournau spoke of “female horror”. For Ducournau, “there is a violence that is very specific to female film-makers, as far as horror is concerned – a violence that is inside, not a violence you have to fight, a violence you have to handle within yourself.” I think this observation is pertinent to female horror novelists as well, and cuts to something important about what femgore might do for its readers. The terror (and therefore pleasure) of the genre is not in the catharsis that comes from experiencing violence-without-violence, but in a sort of complicity: nihilistic identification with the force of violence itself. Can a girl ever hope to be safe from threat, when the world’s cruelty is embedded in her organs like microplastics? Elisha Cuthbert escapes, stumbling, bruised and battered, but whole, into the sunshine, while the femgore heroine stays locked in the basement with blood-spattered walls for life.