“La beauté sans vertu,” Genevieve Valentine: Strong social commentary about the extreme nature of the couture fashion industry, which is its own brand of body horror. It’s effective and repulsive.Īpple | Bookshop | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound “A Positive” imagines a scenario where the child is raised by other means and meant to serve the parents. “A Positive,” Kaaron Warren: Parents are meant to love their children unconditionally, providing them with a nurturing and safe environment in which to grow and thrive. Preying on the desperation of a worn-out single mother, the stalker in this story makes a startling discovery. “You Go Where It Takes You,” Nathan Ballingrud: One of my favorite stories from Ballingrud’s collection North American Lake Monsters presents one of the most subtle, gruesome killers I’ve ever read about. How far will some go to fulfill their basic instincts? This story is so utterly disturbing it filled my head with myriad fears. “Painlessness,” Kirstyn McDermott: A woman incapable of feeling physical pain sells her body to the highest bidders.

Dowling manages to squeeze so much into this short piece about the hunt for a serial killer as it tightens the circle around the perpetrator, thanks to a patient at a psychiatric hospital who’s plagued with visions. “Toother,” Terry Dowling: One of the scariest stories in the whole lot. Think of the worst thing you could find in a motel room and then imagine not being able to leave the offending motel because… well, you’ve changed. “The Travellers Stay,” Ray Cluley: The perfect way to kick off a body horror anthology. Of special interest are the provocative cover artwork and interior illustrations, which add to this whole aesthetic and mood while you read.īecause Body Shocks delivers so epically on its promise to deliver “extreme tales of body horror,” I wanted to give each story a moment in the limelight: Instead of cherry-picking stories from the book, this anthology can be enjoyed cover-to-cover, back-to-back like a favorite record. The table of contents boasts twenty-nine violations of the human body told by a diverse array of talented voices in a variety of genres, skillfully curated and edited by Datlow. “It might be the most disturbing type of horror because it deals with the intimacy of the body’s integrity being breached by intentional mutilation, accidental infestations by parasites, invasion by alien forces, degeneration, transformation, grotesquery, and pain.”

What is body horror? In the introduction to Body Shocks, her newest anthology, Ellen Datlow writes:

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