Tag: body horror

#REVIEW: You Weren’t Meant to be Human, by Andrew Joseph White

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews3 Comments

I three-starred this. But keep reading.

Every so often, when you are in the habit of reviewing things, you encounter something that sort of breaks your review system. Most of the books I read get rated four or five stars, because I have been reading books for my entire life and I have gotten pretty good at picking books that I am going to like. Five stars is a book I really enjoyed and will recommend to people. Four stars is a book that I enjoyed but had some flaws or for whatever reason I feel less likely to talk about. Three stars is a book that was just kind of there; two stars, a lot of the time, was a DNF, and one star was a book I actively loathed and wish to punish.

You tell me: how do I star-rate a book that I personally really did not enjoy reading, but nonetheless recognize as a well-written book that may very well be appealing to other people? Because I have no damn idea, really. You Weren’t Meant to be Human is body horror. It’s about a trans man who gets pregnant. That’s already a body horror situation well before we get to the variety of mental issues that the protagonist, Crane, has. And to avoid being misunderstood, by “mental issues,” I do not mean the fact that Crane is autistic and very nearly nonverbal. No, I’m talking about the rape fantasies (as in fantasizing about being raped) and the degrading sex and the self-mutilation. If you’ve ever needed to read trigger warnings, go nowhere near this book. There are warnings at the beginning of the book, and they are extensive.

It floated through my head at one point that this is the book that TJ Klune would write if TJ Klune was KM Szpara, but I’m not convinced that makes any sense.

In addition to … all that, see those worms on the cover? Crane is part of (kidnapped and forcibly inducted into? Maybe.) a cult that worships, or at least … cares for? this possibly-alien hive mind intelligence that exists in our world mostly as a horrifying conglomeration of bugs and flies and worms and other grotesqueries. Crane knows who the (other) father of his baby is, but at the same time he spends most of the book convinced that he’s about to give birth to a giant slug or perhaps just a giant knot of maggots. The cult does a lot of murdering so that the hive has stuff to eat, and for most of the book Crane is protected/guarded/imprisoned by what is effectively a Frankenstein’s monster cobbled together from the people they’ve fed to the thing. The Frankenstein is named Stagger. Crane occasionally fantasizes about fucking it and there’s at least one sequence where he at least comes close. I’m not going to go back and reread to clarify my memory here.

Y’all, I’m okay with it if I never read another body horror again. I’m good. I’m happy with naming this book the pinnacle of the genre and then never touching it again. This is one of the most brutal and harrowing books I’ve ever read and has one of the most shocking and grotesque endings I’ve ever seen (which, now that I think about it, did get a bit of foreshadowing) and I did not enjoy one single second of reading it.

I’m not sure this book is supposed to be “enjoyed,” is the thing, which is why I’m not comfortable with panning it and why I more or less devoured the fucking thing in one sitting rather than putting it in the freezer and forgetting I ever saw it. A lot of the reviews I’m seeing for it are positively rapturous and the thing is I don’t necessarily disagree with them. I just …

*shiver*

Yeah. No more, thank you. That’s enough of that. But if you feel like you might be into this? I’m not mad about it.

#REVIEW: Carrion (PS5, 2023)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, video gamesLeave a comment

Well, this was an unexpected little bit of awesome.

I don’t know what caused Carrion to catch my eye– I mean, it was on sale for $5, and still is until tomorrow, but that’s usually not enough– but if somehow you happen to be the reason I found this fun little game I need to thank you. Carrion is a pixel-art Metroidvania and a “reverse horror game,” where instead of playing the intrepid scientist or lone soldier trying to kill the horror that wants to eat you, you play the monster. Your goal is to escape the giant facility you’re imprisoned inside, and if you happen to eat every living thing inside it along the way, more the better. You are, effectively, playing a shoggoth; a giant Lovecraftian creature made of flesh and teeth and eyes and tentacles, and over the game you acquire powers ranging from defensive spikes (which I don’t think I ever used, come to think of it) to different movement abilities to growing protective chitin to just getting real, real big and terrifying.

It is gross, in a pixelated sort of way, and your attacks can literally rip your enemies in half. I encourage eating every little part of them, but if you rip someone in half and then just eat their head I think you get the same benefits (health and size upgrades) you get from eating the whole body, so if you decide to toss the legs across the screen, go ahead:

Most screens end up covered in blood after a while, because even your non-offensive moves will cause your shoggoth to leave blood behind; if you smash through a door it won’t actually affect your health but you will leave bloodstains behind.

Your various enemies range from unarmed humans, who will hide and cower, to unarmored people carrying handguns to shotgun- and flamethrower-toting soldiers to the occasional drone and mech. Nothing ever respawns, which led to what at first I thought of as a cheap tactic when facing a ton of enemies– run into an area (your monster moves crazy fast most of the time,) rip someone, anyone in half, and then dart back out before the three guys with flamethrowers and the one guard with a shield and machine gun can kill you. Head to the nearest save point (you basically make your way through areas by unlocking all the save zones, at which point you can get to the next area) and save, which gives you your health back, then rinse and repeat.

It felt cheap until I realized that it was exactly how monster movies work a lot of the time. The monster shows up, kills somebody, then disappears for a few minutes until coming back and killing someone else. The fact that there were generally multiple ways to approach any given zone full of food enemies just made this even better. Of course I can come back at full strength! Did any of the monsters in the Alien movies ever limp? Obviously not. This is a monster movie. My job is to terrorize motherfuckers, not to get killed.

Oh, and you can also smash through a door, then grab the door and beat the hell out of something with it. The way to beat drones is to grab them and bash them into other things, like walls, and floors, and civilians, until they’re broken. It’s a blast.

I had a lot of fun with this, obviously, but there were a few points where the game got in its own way. To start, at the maximum size, your monster can get tricky to control. Check this screenshot out:

You tell me: which end of that thing is the front? Is it going clockwise around that block in the middle or counterclockwise? At maximum size, you can easily stretch most of the way across the screen, or bunch up into a big blob, and this leads to occasional control hiccups, especially when trying to squeeze into small holes or (especially) flip switches at maximum size. There are a couple of places where you need to squeeze into an elevator and flip a switch just outside the elevator to move it, and hitting the switch with a tentacle was more annoying than it should have been. The most frustrating part of the game was a sequence where you needed to be at full size (abilities are tied to the size of your monster, which … was not my favorite design choice) in order to grow armor that would keep a little exploding harpoon-thing from one-shotting you, but the harpoon-thing respawned, and it respawned faster than your armor ability, so if you didn’t get your entire body past the radius of where the harpoon would shoot at you, you could survive the first shot and then get killed by the second one before you could do anything about it. Most of the time, though, traversal was a lot of fun; you can basically move in any direction at any time, as the beast just flings out tentacles and pulls you toward wherever you want to go.

If you have a PS5, there’s literally no reason not to grab this right now while it’s $5. If you like Metroidvanias, it’s maybe a little short, at 5-6 hours, for the full $20 price, but I suspect it’ll be on sale again soon, and even if it’s a little short for the price it’ll be a good time.

#REVIEW: The All-Consuming World, by Cassandra Khaw

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews1 Comment

First, the obligatory “My God, LOOK AT THAT COVER” moment. Go ahead, take a few, they’re free.

DISCLAIMER! Cassandra Khaw’s new novel The All-Consuming World does not actually come out until August 21. I found out that copies of this and her other upcoming book were available through Netgalley the other day and jumped, immediately, and got lucky, and then rearranged my reading schedule so I could get to it as quickly as I could. I have read three previous works by Cass Khaw, including her Hammers on Bone, which was #3 on my Top 10 list for 2016. I think that The All-Consuming World is her first novel; it’s definitely the first novel-length work of hers that I’ve read.

I’ll not bury the lede: my favorite thing about Cassandra Khaw is not her characters or her stories, but her writing. Of all the writers I currently consider myself a fan of, and there are dozens of them, she is the one whose writing abilities I would most like to completely absorb and use for my own dastardly purposes. Her writing is gritty and visceral and verbose in a way that is perfect for either Lovecraftian body horror or what we used to call cyberpunk, and All-Consuming World has elements of both, and my God was this book a joy to read.

Now, that’s kind of a problem as a reviewer, because it’s highly unlikely that I’m going to dislike anything Khaw writes because what she’s writing about is almost irrelevant to me. I’d read a recipe book cover-to-cover if Cass Khaw wrote it. But precisely because she is so stylized an author, I can easily imagine my opposite as a reader out there; I’ll read anything she writes because of how much I like her writing, but there are going to be people out there who are going to bounce off of her style, hard. Toss in the legitimate body horror elements (one character keeps a gun in her ribcage for part of the story) and the fact that the word “fuck” is at least a quarter of one particular character’s dialogue and this becomes a “not for everybody” book. But for me? My god, smear it on my face.

Right, the plot. As if that matters. Here’s the blurb, it’s as good as anything:

A diverse team of broken, diminished former criminals get back together to solve the mystery of their last, disastrous mission and to rescue a missing and much-changed comrade… but they’re not the only ones in pursuit of the secret at the heart of the planet Dimmuborgir. The highly-evolved AI of the universe have their own agenda and will do whatever it takes to keep humans from ever controlling the universe again. This band of dangerous women, half-clone and half-machine, must battle their own traumas and a universe of sapient ageships who want them dead, in order to settle their affairs once and for all. 

And, like, okay, that’s what it’s about, I guess? But this book is more about how it tells its story than the story it tells. The description leaves out that all of the members of the team are at least nominally women (one of them is nonbinary in a way that is either immensely sloppy or really interesting, because I could not figure out what the deal with … that person’s pronouns was at any point in the story*) and most of them are immortal and several of them die during the book and that’s not a spoiler because it’s also not a problem. I think Maya alone goes down at least three times. I think one of them is technically dead for the entire book? Maybe two? No more than two characters are dead for the entire book.

There’s a lot going on here, is what I’m saying. Pre-order this book and read it immediately when it comes out. If you like good things you will like it.

*The character is sometimes he and sometimes she, and will bounce back and forth between both sometimes in a single paragraph, and I either missed the explanation or just couldn’t figure out what the rules were.