Haven’t you heard? There’s a vibe shift coming.
It’s been frequently used as a punch line, this idea that cultural or artistic norms are transitioning into a new era. However, in the early months of 2022, it certainly does seem like there’s something in the air.
I love a sprawling mess of a novel, but as spring has (slowly) arrived, I’ve found myself drawn to lots of smaller books, and a trend has emerged—right now, there seem to be lots of books that are just…gross? And this is gross in a physical sense, not a moral one. These are books that ooze, and bleed, and generally revel in their descriptions of the grotesque. This is nothing new, per se, art of all kinds has a long and storied relationship with the grotesque, but in 2022, the market on a kind of squeamish body-horror seems to be cornered by women.
There’s likely a simple explanation for this—have you seen the world lately?
Horror movies tend to reflect the anxieties of their age. For example, George A. Romero’s Of The Dead movies, for example, took on nuclear radiation, racism, and hollow consumerist existence alongside their shambling hordes of the living dead. In the early days of Hollywood, between the World Wars, Dracula was a popular movie villain because he had a thick European accent. And as American politics really began to viciously split during the 2010s, home invasion movies like The Purge and Don’t Breathe became the dominant subgenre because, well, maybe your neighbors are psychos who wish you harm.
Nowhere was this cultural consciousness more obviously exposed than in the first decade of the 21st century, during which they made seven Saw movies and three Hostel movies, and probably others that nobody remembers. It’s a subgenre that was legitimately just referred to as “torture porn,” a name which is a whole different thing to unpack, but it’s important to note that these movies were being made during the intense debate surrounding US actions in the middle east—namely, the torture (“enhanced interrogation”) of people who were being illegally detained the world over. Torture was on the mind of Americans, and our horror movies reflected that.
So in the spring of 2022, and completely by chance, I read three books in a row, all of which were by different authors, and yet they formed a nice unofficial trilogy. The books were Paradais by Fernanda Melchor, Jawbone by Monica Ojeda, and The Doloriad by Missouri Williams. All three of them are great, and all three of them are fucking gross.
Paradais by Fernanda Melchor (translated by Sophie Hughes) is likely the highest profile of the three, having been longlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize, and it is wild to me that a book like this was even in the running for such a major award, let alone a semi-finalist.
Paradais is a vicious book. It is largely a story about two boys, who only really hang out with each other because each is the other’s only option. Franco is rich, lonely, and overweight, but rich. He has money to spare and time to kill, which he does, by eating junk food and watching an intense amount of pornography, imagining all the while that the women in these videos are his older, glamorous neighbor. There are, peppered throughout, m u l t i p l e paragraphs describing Franco masturbating, in detail, down to the Cheeto dust on his fingertips. It can be, a lot. Melchor’s writing is so unbelievable, however, that you keep going, no matter what she’s putting you through. The voice that this book is written in is nothing short of astounding. It bares its teeth, all menace, its narration and dialogue shot-through with the insults and misogynistic rhetoric of its main characters. The sentences are long, and the paragraphs even longer. Paradais was published by New Directions, which is fitting, because you will not find these kinds of obsessive, grim, unending paragraphs anywhere else this side of Laszlo Krasznahorkai.
The other boy is Paolo, the gardener for the gated-community in which Franco lives. Paolo hates his job, and only befriends Franco because Franco offers him alcohol and cigarettes, which help Paolo cope with his job, and with having to deal with rich people like Franco. Much of Paradais is the two boys getting drunk together, paying special attention to the suffocating humidity, and the sweat that clings to everyone’s skin.
From the first sentence of the book the reader knows the outcome, or at least the horrible direction in which the story will proceed. Paolo knows it too, but doesn’t really take Franco seriously as he begins to float a plan involving that neighbor he’s so obsessed with. Paolo doesn’t even really take the plan seriously until they’ve actually begun to execute the thing, in a horrible climactic breaking-and-entering that has to be experienced in the book. I simply cannot do it justice.
Paradais is a seething little thing, coming in at just 125 pages. But while it’s page count is low, it takes furious issue with the class divides of modern Mexico, as well as a society that lets its still-increasing femicide rate go largely uninvestigated (still urgent problems nearly 20 years after 2666!) And down in South America, things are similarly grim.
The reason I spent so long on horror movies at the outset of this piece is that this sudden crop of feminist grotesqueries seem, at least to me and my galaxy-brain, like an obvious response to the cultural rightward shift that the world has gone through thus far in the 21st century. All over, conservative and austerity parties have taken power, and as always, set their sights on the rights of women. Like in the way that horror movies reflect the anxieties of the age, these books seem to protest against the enacting of state, structural, or interpersonal, violence against women (there have even been horror movies about this starting to crop up). And these books protest by leaning in hard to the unsavory elements of having bodies in the first place.
The other reason that I spent so long on horror movies at the outset of this essay, is that horror—as a genre and as a concept, a feeling—is at the center of Monica Ojeda’s Jawbone (translated by Sarah Booker.) Though they need no introduction, the unofficial slogan for Coffee House Press, who published the book, is “Experimental Books About Death” and wow! does Jawbone ever deliver on that promise.
Jawbone is, for lack of a better word, bonkers. It is a lightning-fast, razor sharp, perspective-shifting, nonlinear, pop-culture-referencing, thing. While Paradais was furious, fitting lots of big ideas into a mere 125 pages, Jawbone might just outdo it. The frame story opens on a girl tied up in a remote cabin, who quickly realizes that she has been kidnapped and is being held hostage by one of her teachers. The rest of the book sets out to explain, in a spectacular blur of vignettes, how she ended up here. Along the way Jawbone is, by turns, a novel, a series of lists, transcripts from meetings with a psychologist, a poem, an online creepypasta, and a 30 page essay on horror and sexuality.
Three of the central themes of Jawbone are horror, the color white, and puberty—three topics that intersect far more easily than you’d think. White, and the horror contained within, stems largely from Moby Dick, which Ojeda makes the claim is a kind of cosmic horror novel. If cosmic horror is, in the Lovecraftian sense, defined by our inability to wrap our minds around a thing, then the color white makes a perfect vehicle. Ishmael says of the whale that “it was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.” He’s frightened by the color because it doesn’t seem like it could occur naturally. Ojeda captures this brilliantly when she says that white is “pure potential, always close to becoming anything else.” The whale shouldn’t be white, it should have become some other color, stained by having to exist in such a grimy world, and yet.
Ojeda uses the “pure potential” of the color white in conjunction with white’s often-used symbolizing of purity, and she ties it together with the theme of puberty. Much of Jawbone takes place at the Delta Bilingual Academy, a school for girls, where these themes are really on full display. The girls are in high school, they’re young, they have not yet decided what to do with their lives. They are “pure potential.” They are starting to develop their own personalities, rather than just following blindly the wills of their parents and teachers, and some of the personalities are developing into something unbecoming of a fancy girls prep school. The students are also at an age where people usually begin to experiment with dating, playing into the idea of purity, and virginity, associated with the color white. Some of the girls have even begun to date among themselves, which adds an additional taboo. Traditionally, sexuality is associated with the tarnishing of purity, and thus the erasing of “pure potential,” a fact that is driving Miss Clara (the kidnapping teacher from the frame story) toward the brink of collapse, until collapse she does.
The third way that this story is about the tarnishing of purity, and the horror therein, is that this book is about bodies and all of the unsavory, smelly things that they do. Tied up in the cabin, Fernanda (one of our main characters) has no choice but to urinate on herself as the days drag on with no end in sight. Girls fight, pulling out each other’s hair. There are multiple references to the smell, color, and texture of menstrual blood. Used tampons are dangled by their strings in front of people’s faces. A character’s split knee is described as looking like a toothless baby’s mouth, and it foams with dying bacteria when disinfected. It is a visceral book in the realest possible sense of the word.
Jawbone is a daring, thrilling book that challenges you to reckon with preconceived ideas about women, and how they’re supposed to behave, and how they are supposed to inhabit their bodies. Which brings us to our final book in our roundup of Feminist Grotesqueries.
The Doloriad, by Missouri Williams, is a debut novel, published in March of 2022 by MCDxFSG. It is also a critically polarizing nightmare book that’s not unlike reading a Francisco Goya painting. It is monstrous, a little surreal, very harshly lit, and impossible to look away from once it has you. I loved it, and have recommended it to a half-dozen friends already.
The title winks to Greek epics (or tragedies) in that the book is about misery (“dolor”) and it gives us the name of our main character (Dolores), with the declension “-iad,” indicating the topic of the book. The Doloriad is about both of these things. Post-apocalyptic in setting, and biblical in its violence (both physical and sexual), the jacket copy concludes that it “stares down, with narrowed eyes, humanity’s unbreakable commitment to life.” Which is true, but I think it’s the less interesting interpretation of what the book sets out to accomplish.
Absurd in a pitch-black way, and rendered in absolutely breathtaking language, you don’t need to crane your neck to see the long, long shadow that Samuel Beckett has cast over this book. Our main character is Dolores, a legless girl who is the product of a generation of inbreeding. The world has ended in a cataclysm that nobody really remembers anyway, and a group of survivors, led by their mother The Matriarch, have taken up camp outside of a mysterious, nameless city (it’s Prague). Tasked with repopulating the earth, The Matriarch has decided to remake the world quite literally in her image, through the inbreeding of her various offspring. It’s an unflinching look at the question of, what if all of humanity really was descended from Adam and Eve? How would that have progressed? Here we have our answers.
While it’s true that the book stares down “humanity’s unbreakable commitment to life,” I think the most interesting question that The Doloriad raises is: "who are we continuing the world for?" If humanity’s commitment to life is unbreakable, and if, by conventional thinking, only the strongest survive, then does that mean the future of humanity is heartless, violent, and cold? What does that future look like for oppressed groups of all kinds?
Much like the biblical offspring, several of the Matriarch’s children kill their siblings, for various reasons. We wait for the arrival of a Moth God, and an invading army of other survivors, neither of which ever appear. There are several dreamlike episodes of a children’s TV show about Saint Thomas Aquinas. Ultimately the Matriarch disappears, and book concludes on a semi-hopeful (and Christ-like!) note as the most violent of the siblings is overthrown, and the most compassionate of them assumes leadership, with Dolores, their lowliest, at his side.
Ending our tour of Feminist Grotesqueries at the beginning, The Doloriad has epigraphs from Franz Kafka, and Clarice Lispector. The Kafka quote is longer, while the Lispector quote simply says: “the sainthood of the laity is more painful.” And while “laity” denotes the common people of the congregation, as opposed to the clergy, it does strike me that, off the page, the word sounds a little like “lady.”