Content Warning: mentions of child abuse and sexual violence
Although I generally don’t support buying books from megacorporations, sometimes when you’ve got a friend’s birthday party tomorrow and you’ve had a busy week, you have to make a deal with the devil and visit the local Barnes & Noble. It was during one of these occasions that I saw something truly shocking. As I was browsing, I noticed a display advertising some select horror titles. Here, among the genre’s mainstays like Stephen King and Dean Koontz, laid two books I’d never expected to see in a nonindependent bookstore: Nick Cutter’s (one of Craig Davidson’s pseudonyms) “The Troop,” a novel about Boy Scouts infected by a parasite that drives them to cannibalism, and Agustina Bazterrica’s “Tender is the Flesh,” centered around humans raising and eating other humans for meat. Both of these belong to the niche, explicitly unconventional world of extreme horror.
To the uninitiated, a genre title that just adds the superlative of “extreme” to “horror” can seem a little silly. In this case, though, the naming is actually pretty apt: Extreme horror novels take traditional scary stories to their logical extremes. Where the commercial horror landscape is made up of novels full of suspense, extreme horror novels are chock full of stomach-churning gore. The litmus test of whether something is a “horror” novel or an “extreme horror” novel is whether the graphic content seems unnecessary and indulgent or not, in which case it would be the latter.
That description may make these books seem inferior to their non-extreme counterparts, but the absurdity of the genre is at the core of these novel’s philosophies. The movement to create these disgusting, over-the-top gore-fests isn’t new. Author David J. Schow, in fact, prefers to call the extreme horror genre something different: splatterpunk. He coined the term back in 1990 with his title “Seeing Red,” but many point to Jack Ketchum — specifically his 1989 work “The Girl Next Door” — as the genre’s first trailblazer. As the “punk” label connotes, these novels are created to skirt the mainstream, pushing against the ambiguity that traditional publishing forces horror authors to use when telling their stories. They are the opposite of subtle and use attention-grabbing obscenity to punctuate their moral and political messages. In a way, these books about cannibalistic necrophiliacs are forms of protest.
But why books? Hasn’t this kind of thing been done to death with ultra-violent horror movies? Sort of, but not really. Unfortunately for anyone itching to get their creative vision put to screen, movies are expensive to make, requiring teams of people and approval from studios as well as numerous other funders. In the age of the internet, books can be written and widely distributed as long as an author is passionate and driven enough to do so. Inversely, you can’t make a horror-thriller flick depicting graphic harm to children — the number of funders who would allow that to be filmed is practically nonexistent, not to mention a total lack of public interest in seeing something like that in theaters. Such visual graphic depictions of violence against children just aren’t acceptable to audiences. “Saw X,” the latest entry in a film franchise known for its horrific gore, explicitly draws the line here. When Carlos (Jorge Briseño, “A Million Miles Away”), an innocent child, is placed in a torture trap by an evil blonde lady — how and why is so convoluted it’s not worth getting into — things have gone too far for notorious serial killer Jigsaw (Tobin Bell, “The Firm”). He then commits an act of self-sacrifice both to save Carlos, but also to ensure that the audience will not witness something as morally deplorable as a child murdered in such a brutal way. Jigsaw then proceeds to call the kid a warrior. It’s crazy.
In contrast, no one is preventing people from writing that kind of content, as extreme horror darling Aron Beauregard’s “Playground” does with near glee. Beauregard is at the forefront of today’s splatterpunk movement, with books like “The Slob” at the top of Goodreads’ “most popular” books in the genre. Child torture isn’t just a feature of “Playground;” it is the core shock anchoring the story. Big bad Geraldine Borden has designed a playground-esque torture chamber for low-income children, and their parents have been forced to watch. What happens next? I’ll let you, dear reader, fill in the blanks — the book even comes with gruesome illustrations that I cannot and will not include here.
This, obviously, is a level of carnage that reaches the border of absurdity. Considering that, what are books from this corner of the internet doing in Barnes and Noble?
The answer has a lot to do with how almost all genre fiction gets selected: social media trends. For better or for worse, BookTok has an ironclad hold on literary consumption and extreme horror is taking the place by storm. Even beyond the corporate bookstore, the rise of e-books has made the self-published mainstays of the genre more popular and accessible than ever. If you have a friend who’s into scary stories, it’s entirely possible that they’ve gotten their hands on one of these once extremely fringe novels.
However, a book’s popularity and commercial success doesn’t always correlate with its quality. As we begin to see the market flooded with more sickening plotlines, it’s important to ask ourselves: Are these books really any good?
In a word? No. Not really. On the whole, the novels accomplish what they set out to do — that is, be shocking and gross — and don’t do much else. While gratuitous violence is the point, the disproportionate amount of harm towards women and other minority groups in these books, especially in the form of sexual violence, is worrying. I am not in the camp that these topics, even when graphic, should be avoided altogether; but when they are covered they need to be treated with respect since it’s crucial that we bring this kind of brutality to light. In this context, however, it’s easy for the humanity of these stories’ targets to fall by the wayside. It’s similar to the recent trend of abuse-based novels pushed as “romances;” while no one would believe cannibalism isn’t that big of a deal after reading a novel centered around it, the same cannot be said about sexual violence after repeat mainstream exposure.
But there’s hope for our new era of scary stories. There are some good extreme horror novels. Really good ones, in fact. Remember “Tender is the Flesh”? That book won Argentina’s prestigious Premio Clarin de Novela prize, received a glowing New York Times review and has even been studied in academic literary journals. All this, and the book is just as graphic as its extreme horror counterparts. The difference? Bazterrica’s goal for the novel was more than just to make audiences squirm in their seats. Using the metaphor of literal state-sponsored cannibalism, “Tender is the Flesh” is about the horrors of capitalism, and how ignoring the savagery of our current system just leads to more viciousness. All of the tricks that make the typical gory book unremarkable turn this one into a potent gut punch. You don’t even have to have such lofty goals to make a good novel of this kind: “The Troop” is widely admired for its character work and tension, not just its gross-out moments.
Call it a protest movement, a subversion of genre or just plain gratuitous, but extreme horror is here to stay. While it’s here, I encourage my fellow horror-enjoyers to try out one of these titles that has substance beyond the gruesome violence. Just maybe not while you’re eating.
Daily Arts Writer Grace Sielinski can be reached at gsielins@umich.edu.
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