By Louise Willder, copywriter at Penguin Books and author of Blurb Your Enthusiasm: An A-Z of Literary Persuasion (London: Oneworld Publications, 2022), a Times Book of the Year.
The one guarantee about living in a human body is that, at some stage, it will let you down. Our bodies are remarkable things, but they also age, ache, break, change, leak, bleed, scar, get infected and cause us pain. We cannot escape it, and it scares us. Consequently, fear of our bodies, of illness and imperfection, is at the heart of the literature of fear, whether a traditional English ghost story or a fantasy horror novel. ‘Body horror’ is an established genre in film, with directors such as David Cronenberg and Julia Ducournau exploring and exploiting the degeneration or destruction of the physical body with gory glee. But well before this, the same fear of things happening to our bodies ran through supernatural tales: of invasion; of contagion; of transformation; and of mutilation.