Bodies are just bodies, right? Whether it’s the killer physique that gets her tons of followers on social media or the corpse that she’s stealing from a funeral home to sell on the black market, Poppy hasn’t thought much about bodies other than what they can do for her. But when a corpse pickup goes horribly, violently wrong one night, Poppy is forced to reevaluate everything she thought she knew about bodies and their value. Chuck Tingle’s latest horror novel, Fabulous Bodies, is an equally thoughtful and terrifying work of body horror. I highly recommend the audiobook, which is narrated by Mara Wilson (whom fellow millennials will recognize as the actress from beloved childhood movie Matilda).
Poppy Stringer had a rough start to life as an orphan living in a group home but she knows she was made for fame and fortune. The fame part is easy enough: With her good looks, easy charm, and consistent posting schedule, Poppy has gained hundreds of thousands of followers as a fashion influencer on social media. But fortune has been harder to come by and she needs to supplement her influencer income if she’s going to maintain the kind of lifestyle her followers expect of her and, more importantly, give her daughter the childhood Poppy wishes she could have had. So she moonlights as a body thief, sneaking bodies out of morgues and delivering them to black market buyers. But when the body of iconic rockstar Eddie Michaels gets up and walks out of her truck one night, Poppy’s life quickly goes off the rails. Reanimated Eddie is on a mission, and he wants Poppy by his side as he carves a bloody path through Palm Springs to complete an ancient ritual.
The character of Eddie plays with the classic Gothic trope of the Faustian bargain. Specifically, he claims to be a musician who has sold his soul to the devil in exchange for fame and supernatural talent, a tale all too common in folklore around the world. But Eddie’s true story is not so simple. He’s less a victim of an unequal bargain with a supernatural entity and more like the devil in these stories: Eddie has full agency and receives all the benefits from the arrangement he has created. He wants Poppy to make her own “deal with the devil,” but the kicker is that he doesn’t actually need her consent. Eddie can play the charming con man when he wants to, but his true power is in controlling the minds and bodies of others.
On that note, Fabulous Bodies brilliantly combines both the visceral and psychological elements of body horror. Body horror as a genre usually involves horrors that physically damage and transform the body, but equally as important is the sense of violation and alienation from the body that comes from a loss of autonomy or control. The violence in this book gets quite gory—I would not recommend it to the squeamish. I suppose it shouldn’t really come as a surprise that an author who rose to fame for his erotica is adept at writing visceral depictions of bodies in other contexts, as well. But as gruesome as the physical violence is, the far more terrifying moments take place within Poppy’s head. Over the course of the night, Poppy learns that Eddie has a supernatural power of compulsion: he can order you to kill others or yourself and you have no choice but to obey. He can even control your emotions, ordering you to feel unattached as you watch others commit atrocities. But more often, he allows people to fully feel the horror as they ride along like a silent witness trapped in their own bodies. To Poppy, not being in control of her own body and mind is far more terrifying than any destructive act of violence that Eddie or his mind-controlled minions could inflict on her. By the end of the novel, Poppy realizes that she will do whatever it takes to maintain agency over her own body, even if it means putting that body through unimaginable agony. Like the Final Girl in a slasher story, Poppy only becomes even more determined to survive as she endures horrors that would incapacitate nearly anyone else.
If you haven’t checked out Chuck Tingle’s horror fiction yet, you definitely should! I really enjoyed the whacky but equally visceral cosmic horror in Camp Damascus when it came out a few years ago, and it’s great to see him branching out into different horror traditions. If you’ve got a strong stomach and are interested in horror stories about reclaiming your body, confronting death, and proving love, definitely check out Fabulous Bodies, which just came out last month. You can find it on shelves now at your favorite local retailer, or buy it online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. Once you’ve read it, let me know your thoughts in the comments.