Body Horror Fiction About Women

Body Horror Fiction About Women

This article relates to I Am the Ghost Here

In Kim Samek's short story collection I Am the Ghost Here, several stories fall into the realm of "body horror." The phrase refers to books or movies featuring the transformation or mutilation of the human body. The term was coined by Philip Brophy in a 1983 article on horror films. Although the concept might seem unique to cinema, it can in fact be traced back in literature to early 19th-century Gothic tropes (think Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, through to today's horror and science fiction authors.

Body horror is so frightening because the source of dread is within the individual, rather than external, and thus inescapable. It reminds us that our bodies are never fully under our own control. Some movies emphasize the gross-out factor, but the horror is not always about gratuitous gore. Rather, the destruction of bodies might be symbolic of important moral and political messages. The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh suggests that the subgenre uses "the body or disease as metaphor to explore societal norms, expectations and systemic violence." Still, the experience of reading these sorts of books might be quite visceral.

We've chosen some examples of fiction in which body horror allows the authors to, like Samek, explore the challenges that women face.

Two of the 10 stories of Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung (2022, translated from Korean by Anton Hur) voice subconscious alarm over pregnancy and motherhood. The book opens with "The Head," in which a woman's excrement forms a head that emerges from the toilet and calls her its mother. Her husband downplays the threat, but he's not the one shackled to this creature for decades to come. In "The Embodiment," going on the Pill backfires when it makes a young woman pregnant and she feels the pressure to find a father for her fetus. Through these satirical and slightly grotesque situations, Chung points to the patriarchal tendencies of Korean society and beyond.

Lakewood by Megan Giddings (2020) is a speculative novel inspired by the infamous Tuskegee experiments. With her grandmother dead and her mother chronically ill, Lena Johnson is the only one who can clear her family's debts. She leaves college to become a medical test subject. In one experiment, her eyes turn blue and she visits a bar to see how others respond to her. As race and class intersect, some bodies are considered expendable.

Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties (2017) is similarly concerned with bodily autonomy, especially that of queer women. Characters start to disappear when they fail to meet gendered standards in "Real Women Have Bodies." The protagonist of "Eight Bites" has surgery to limit her food intake. "The Husband Stitch" is a retelling of the well-known story in which a woman wears a mysterious green ribbon around her neck.

Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh (2022) is a twisted medieval fairy tale in which the female characters are always lactating and some are forced to become mothers. Ina, the village midwife (who is also a witch), swaps a horse's eyes for her own to cure her blindness. Be warned that this fable about how corrupt political and religious leaders exploit the masses contains graphic violence and is not for the squeamish.

In Chlorine by Jade Song (2023), Ren is a Chinese American high school student and competitive swimmer. As she explores her attraction to her best friend, Cathy, Ren has to cope with extremely heavy periods and a sexual assault by a male teammate. She ponders whether literally turning herself into a mermaid is the answer to her problems.

Filed under Reading Lists

This article relates to I Am the Ghost Here. It first ran in the April 22, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.