Body Shocks: Extreme Tales of Horror
Ellen Datlow (ed.)
Tachyon Publications (October 19, 2021)
Reviewed by Nora B. Peevy
If the illustrated cover of an eye, surrounded by porcupine spines and nerves and arterial branches doesn’t scream body horror, I don’t know what does. This book is not only a creepy good read, but the illustrations inside are so meticulous and gorgeous, it elevates this book to high art. Ellen Datlow picked out a great lineup with some of the best names in the business to terrorize me before I slept each night like Christopher Fowler, Priya Sharma, Tanarive Due, R.C. Matheson, Cody Goodfellow, and Gemma Files, just to name a few. This book is a chunker. It is not an anthology I was able to zip through in one night, nor did I want to do so. The detail in each story was varied and rich like a finely woven tapestry and no two tales were the same.
I quivered at Toother by Terry Dowling, as victims had their teeth removed in serial cases dating back decades. I marveled at Christopher Fowler’s The Look and how people will do anything to get into the modeling industry. That you usually only have “the look” for a year and must capitalize on it insistently. But my favorite story was Caitlìn R. Kiernan’s Elegy for a Suicide in which a woman finds a straight razor in a hole of living fungi, which she plunges into and gets extremely sick from. I watched her die on every page in slow motion and her lover wax from being angry at her for not fighting to stay with her to pitying her and wanting her suffering to end. The writing was extremely powerful. All the writing in this collection is strong, which is probably because it’s been handpicked by one of the Queens of Horror who has curated over twenty-five anthologies and knows how to scare her audience with only the blink of an eye.
Don’t blink while you’re reading this collection. You won’t want to miss any of it. It’s one of the best body horror anthologies I’ve come across in a long time. I think it’s perfect for a night of long reading with a good snack before bed. But savor each story slowly, because they are so flavorful and you won’t want to miss anything.
