Graphic Content: Family Tree, Vol. 1: Sapling by Jeff Lemire and Phil Hester

 

The title of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” isn’t hyperbole or symbolism (that comes later in the story). The subject of the story is an old man with wings sprouting from his back. He crashlands in a couple’s yard and with his arrival flock the pious and the curious, those who see the old man as either a celestial being or an oddity to be put in captivity for our amusement. If the story has a moral, it’s that  when humanity discovers something truly awe-inspiring, we’d probably find some way to ruin it. The “humanity ruins everything” trope has been explored throughout literature, both fantastical and mundane, but there are times where it goes beyond simply that people are intrinsically terrible. Jeff Lemire and Phil Hester, for example, created a story where they combine the fantastic and mundane to  explore familial bonds in the aptly titled Family Tree, Vol. 1: Sapling.

The story centers on single mom Loretta, her angsty teenage son Josh, and her young daughter Megan, who seems to be turning into a tree. What begins as a rash on her skin soon becomes bark complete with branches and leaves. Adding to the drama is the return of the kids’ grandfather/Loretta’s father-in-law Judd, an old man who’s handy with a shotgun. Soon the reunited family goes on the run from a mysterious group called the Arborists that wants Meg for their own ends. As the family flees and tensions between them rise, more is revealed about what the Arborists want and what Megan’s skin-to-bark affliction actually is.

The images of Megan’s skin becoming bark, plus some other spoiler-laden images of what this affliction does, puts it in the realm of body horror, but there’s also a fantastical undercurrent, particularly when Lemire’s story explores what is happening to Megan and many others around the world. Beneath the bark of this body horror fantasy are layers (or rings) of familial relationships that seem to give the title of this book a deeper meaning beyond the obvious pun. These layers include Loretta and grandfather/father-in-law Judd sniping at each other over what happened to the kid’s father or Meg learning more about her father thanks to what’s happening to her. Yes, there’s some graphic skin-to-bark depictions, but Hester shows real skill in depicting the pain in each family members’ expressions from annoyance to anger to terror. This story incorporates body horror, but those expecting a bloodbath with monster trees might be disappointed. This Family Tree is more about the lives of individual branches trying to discover their roots (yes, the tree puns are done). Just like Marquez used a pseudoangel to explore human weakness and a desire for meaning, Family Tree, Vol. 1: Sapling  uses an apocalyptic tree disease to explore how family makes us who we are, for better or worse.

New Arrival: Transmuted by Eve Harms

 

Body horror is a genre that generates fear because the horror is inescapable. To escape many of our anxieties, we could lock our doors, turn off social media, or seal ourselves behind a brick wall, but how can we escape from the fragile meat and water sacks that house our minds? The breakdown of our bodies is inevitable, and a lot of body horror, such as The Fly and its depiction of Seth Brundle’s physical and mental collapse, horrifies the audience as we are forced to ponder such a thing happening to us. This has become the status quo for many body horror tales, but writer Eve Harms offers a very original and uniquely emotional take on body horror with her book Transmuted.

The story follows Isa, a trans woman who finally has finally earned enough money to afford a major surgery she needs, but familial obligations swoop in and drain her bank account. Desperate, IIsa becomes involved with a doctor whose procedures promise radical body transformations. At first, she enjoys what she’s becoming, but soon Isa starts to become something that no longer looks human.

The crux of this book is the Faustian deal Isa makes when she has no other options, a sly bit of social commentary on the state of trans people and how they often deal with a lack of medical resources. The bargain Isa makes allows her to enjoy a life where she begins to feel comfortable in her skin, even getting a new girlfriend. However, when this security is brutally torn away from Isa, readers can feel her pain, especially with Harms’s flair for visceral description as well as her emotional torture from realizing what she’s becoming. The emotional resonance is an excellent anchor for the book, even as it delves into alchemists and Resident Evil style action. This could have led to the book straying from its character-driven plot, but it ultimately proves what I call the Joe Lansdale Effect. Basically, Lansdale, in his story “Bubba Ho-Tep,” has Elvis and a black man who thinks he’s JFK (or he might be JFK dyed black, according to JFK) hunt a mummy in a Texas rest home. The story’s off-the-wall premise works because readers truly empathize with Elvis, a protagonist that realizes his best years are behind him but still has the chance to discover a purpose in his life. In Transmuted, you can buy secret cults and chimeric creatures because Isa is a character with whom the audience can empathize, from how she is regarded by her family to the setbacks she’s dealt, and even when the story cranks up the body horror and fantastical elements, readers will still care about Isa’s journey.

Have You Read This? Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy by Hailey Piper

 

Short fiction is a subtle art form. Most writers can churn out a book’s worth of short stories in a coffee-soaked weekend. There are far fewer writers who turn the short story into something more than just a short story. They can turn a story into something that stays with you, stains your being, long after you finish reading them. Hailey Piper has demonstrated that she belongs in this exclusive group of writers with her short story collection Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy.

Short story collections can be a mixed bag. Many have a few memorable stories while the rest are clunkers, or the author isn’t able to maintain a consistent quality of work throughout the collection. Not so with Piper. Each of her stories stands out because they are each so unique that Hailey Piper can be her own brand, like Stephen King and Joe Lansdale. This collection also promises a great deal of variety for the reader. Want something in outer space? Try the claustrophobic witch hunt tale “Hairy Jack.” Looking for a Pennywise-level monstrosity? Prepare to swear off ice cream forever with her macabre tale “We All Scream.” Want something a bit loud, as loud as, say, a revving chainsaw? Then check out “I’m Not a Chainsaw Kind of Girl, But . . .” And if you want something that borders on Clive Barker levels of horror transcendence, indulge in the deliciously decadent “The Recitation of the First Feeding.”  All of these stories are told in Piper’s viscerally poetic, but never purple, prose.

Something that also makes these stories unique is their focus on LGBTQ characters. Piper, a member of this community, explores the trials and tribulations from many different perspectives within the community, such as a young transgendered person experiencing the horrors of the public restroom. There has been much talk of alternative voices in horror, exploring other voices besides Stephen King Lite or straight, white male angst. Horror should represent all voices because it is human nature to be afraid and to hopefully, eventually overcome that fear. If we can’t overcome fear alone, then sharing those experiences through the horror story can help us realize that others out there are just as afraid, possibly of the very thing we’re afraid of wearing a different mask. Piper’s collection not only explores perhaps her own anxieties but those anxieties (isolation, loss of identity, etc.) that are universally tied to the human condition.

Screen to Scream: The Lighthouse and Punishment by Hope

The ocean. It covers two/thirds of the planet, yet humanity still fears it. Sure, we swim in it, float boats on top of it, and we even go underneath it for long periods of time, thanks to the wonders of engineering. But the ocean is still frightening. Within its depths, there is no air for us to breathe, the pressure can crush you like an empty beer can, and there are many monsters with teeth, tentacle, and stinger that could easily kill you. In Jaws, Brody, Quint, and Hooper weren’t just afraid of the shark but of the water that was Jaws’s turf. So in a nutshell, the sea can be terrifying and a great setting for horror. Two examples of this are the Robert Eggers film The Lighthouse and Erik Hofstatter’s bizarre tale Punishment by Hope.

The plot of The Lighthouse is pretty easy to explain: In the 1890’s two men (played by Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe)  try to maintain their sanity while working at a lighthouse on a remote New England island. They spectacularly fail to hold onto sanity. But there’s also a lot going on within the movie itself that goes beyond both men doing their best impression of Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance. Viewers are given an intimate view of the two men gradually getting on each other’s nerves until those taut nerves snap. Willem Dafoe’s Thomas Wake is a stern taskmaster, constantly giving Pattinson’s Ephraim Winslow a variety of taxing chores while banning him from the lighthouse’s light. Ephraim Winslow, a less-than-model employee, begins to see strange things from sea monsters to mermaids to the man who had his old job. This eventually leads to a violent confrontation between the two men and their mutual ruin. Rife with symbolism and playing on many established myths and tropes, from the siren leading seafaring men to their deaths to the story of Prometheus, The Lighthouse is a hallucinogenic journey down the dark and briney rabbit hole, a mythic tragedy underscoring the dangers of tempting fate, the sea, or whatever lives at the top of the lighthouse.

While The Lighthouse is grounded in the reality of the sea around New England in the 1890’s, Hofstatter’s Punishment by Hope takes place on the sea in an entirely different plane of existence. Nim spends his time longing for a mysterious woman who constantly refuses his advances. No matter how many times he swims to her, no matter what kinds of burdens he carries for her, she rejects him despite her becoming the center of his universe. If Hofstatter’s story plays on the siren myth, it flips the script by having the object of desire actively reject that role. What is assured is the sense of overwhelming tragedy that gradually pulls Nim into a deal that might be called a Faustian deal if it were on dry land, but may make readers, perhaps unfairly, think of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid (not so much the Disney version). To reveal too much about the story takes away from its power, but it also might not even be the point. Hofstatter excels not in creating a tight narrative but in creating a surreal fever dream that reads like epic poetry, carrying readers along on waves of gorgeous metaphors to this tale’s conclusion. Like The Lighthouse and Laird Hunt’s In the House in the Dark of the Woods, Punishment by Hope is less like reading a story and more like drowning in the imagery of a painting that draws the eye and sucks you in. Both film and book are works of art where viewers and readers can get lost in the various swirls of black, white, blue, and red that are both artists’ individual palettes.