I’m finally reading another Octavia E. Butler novel, Clay’s Ark (1984). It’s hard to find her books in used-book stores, perhaps because she is so popular. This is the fifth and last of her Patternist series, which were her early novels, but it is actually a prequel to the others, so I guess it’s good that I’m reading this first.
Set in a dystopian future that seems somewhat dated, it tells of an alien virus that changes people into a more animalistic species (when it doesn’t outright kill them), absolutely compelled to reproduce and survive (goodbye morals). A small enclave of the infected isolate themselves in the desert, not wanting to infect the human race, but also not wanting to die.
Because of Butler’s excellent writing and characterization, this rises above sensationalism, but the narrow scope makes it seem very much like a dress rehearsal for Butler’s masterpiece, Dawn, which I read and discussed almost two years ago (What non-Go book are you reading right now? - #528 by Conrad_Melville).
Both novels involve “body horror,” stories featuring the alteration or transformation of the human body, Most BH stories—about vampires, werewolves, and zombies, for example—present a fait accompli that evokes little if any visceral revulsion concerning the transformation, as distinct from the danger to others. There are exceptions. Guy Endore’s excellent The Werewolf of Paris (1933) depicts the moral and physical revulsion of the protagonist. The original Outer Limits TV series had two 1963 episodes of effective BH: “The Architects of Fear,” in which a volunteer is gradually transformed into a pseudo alien in an attempt to perpetrate a false-flag operation to unite the world; and “A Feasibility Study,” about aliens who kidnap humans for a medical experiment, a story so grotesquely weird that the TV censors blocked its broadcast for 9 months, despite an ending that is one of the most beautiful and inspirational in SF film history.
In the horror field, Edward Lucas White’s “Lukundoo” (1907) really evokes BH cringe in ways exceeding Poe, I think. Lovecraft touched on BH in the Cthulhu mythos and in “Cool Air,” but lacked the writing ability to put it across as well as modern writers.
Historically, science fiction rarely dealt with real BH. Campbell’s Who Goes There? (1938), the basis for John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), focused on the paranoid suspense and the problem-solving of the blood test to determine who was human, rather than on the BH emphasized in the film. George Langelaan’s 1957 story, “The Fly,” the basis for the film versions, may be the first real BH story in SF although some people may regard it as too over-the top. I’ve generally thought of Greg Bear’s novella, “Blood Music” (1983, expanded into a novel in 1984), as the beginning of SF body horror (even scarier today than when it was written).
Today, BH is everywhere. Most notably in the film 28 Days Later (2002), in M. C. Carey’s The Girl with all the Gifts (2014, made into a movie in 2016, and spun off into a TV series, The Last of Us), and in Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (2014, made into a movie in 2018).
My personal pick for the most effective BH film is District 9 (2010). where the gradual transformation into an alien never fails to viscerally horrify film reactors (people who record their first viewing of a film for their YouTube channel).