“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.”
(Sept.What is body horror? In the introduction to Body Shocks, her newest anthology, Ellen Datlow writes: Nalo Hopkinson provides an introduction Barnes contributes an afterword. Even facing the end of the world and what comes after it, Due remains in control, carefully unveiling characters’ thoughts and feelings to her enthralled readers. Pandemic disease in “Patient Zero” and zombie apocalypse in “Danger Word” (the latter coauthored by Due’s husband and frequent collaborator, Steven Barnes) heartbreakingly overwhelm adults’ best efforts to protect the young. Childhood acts as a prism for varied emotions, encouraging readers to empathize with a weary mother who allows a well-behaved spirit to possess her unruly child “just for the summer” (“Summer”). In the title novella, a family under threat of divorce finds reunion through a boy’s ghost hunt, which exposes the historical tragedy splitting the Florida town in which they summer.
Ghosts abound, bringing past and present into liberating contact. Sexual predators are recast as lake creatures (“The Lake”), and werewolves choose cosmetic treatment to disguise their monthly changes (“Aftermoon”) Due craftily employs these shape-shifters to explore how humans embrace transformations in ourselves and one another, even when the result is monstrous. In these extraordinary tales, American Book Award–winner Due ( My Soul to Take) uses a clear-eyed view of history to explain (but never excuse) the present.
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