Introduction and Guide: Testing the Limits

by L. Andrew Cooper and H.J. Dutton

with Silas the Scribble Man, Border Patrol

    "Pain can work from the outside in.
     I mean that sometimes what you see is pain. Pain in its cruelest, purest form. Without drugs or sleep or even shock or coma to dull it for you.
     You see it and you take it in. And then it's you."
          --Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door

Transgressive, extreme horror has to test some people’s limits–and probably go past some people’s limits–to earn the labels “transgressive” and “extreme.” If it’s transgressive it’s crossing some line, some limit or other, and if it’s extreme, it’s out there, near or beyond the limits. But practically, when most people think of “extreme horror” and its ilk, they think of levels of gore unacceptable to the mainstream. They think of the “splatter” in “splatterpunk.”

But horror uses more than gore to test limits. The final two stories that we showcase here, the ones we’ve rated as the most extreme of the bunch, don’t have much in the way of blood and gore at all. We have other ways to violate your comfort zone.

Welcome to Horrific Scribes Exhibit Seven: Testing the Limits.

We begin with Gallery One: What You Know About Being You, which focuses on your sense of yourself as a person, a human, with different takes on dehumanization and attacks on your assumptions about personhood.

Marco Herrera (MAHH!) delivers a kind of body horror in “Brisket” derived not from degradation of the human body but from the human body perceived not as exceptional but as meat like any other. The human is the body, and the body is an object–worse than that, it’s an object to be consumed and enjoyed. Thus, Herrera serves up not only meaty nastiness but also tests the limits of human desecration.

“The Canvas” by Maxim Volk approaches similar horrors about the body and objectification from a different direction. A person gives up his flesh to be an object, a surface for the creation of artwork. The artist consumes and enjoys him in their act of creation, but in becoming the object, the artist’s canvas also enjoys. Ironically, objectification makes him the subject of pleasure. The body as object, especially when sexual pleasure is involved, becomes both horrifying and alluring, destabilizing comfortable notions of humans as people who control themselves.

Gallery One ends with Fendy S. Tulodo’s “The Black Gut Laugh,” which might give you the impression that notions of the human are out of control completely. Almost everything in this story is in flux: humans or the human-like transform, subjects become objects or vice versa, individual bodies become a collective body. Whatever you think is stable and delimited about your status as human doesn’t have to be. Whatever is you about you doesn’t have to be.

For Gallery Two, we think more about social relations, particularly assumptions and norms about mainstream femininity and masculinity. While reality seldom fits into tidy categories, human thinking tends toward binaries: life/death, good/bad, subject/object, human/inhuman, male/female, etc. This either/or way of thinking has historically almost always been hierarchical, i.e. being on one side of the “/” is inherently better than being on the other. The formation of a binary, indeed, its definition, hinges on the expulsion of one side by the other, expulsion you might imagine as shitting, vomiting, bleeding, or even as a soul shuffling off a corpse. Psychoanalyst and cultural critic Julia Kristeva famously calls this expulsion process abjection, noting in Powers of Horror, “The abject has only one quality of the object–that of being opposed to I.” If you take “I/not-I” or perhaps “self/other” as the prime binary, not-I or other is expelled filth. On some level, perhaps an unconscious one, the lesser side of the binary is a horror.

The first attraction in Gallery Two is a series of eighteen horrorku (horror haiku) by Vampirlibido, each a hard-hitting depiction of the “monstrous-feminine,” a concept that develops Kristeva’s notion of abjection in relation to representations of women in horror imagery. With few words, Vampirlibido spans the globe to capture examples of women vilified, abjectified, as monsters of mythic proportions, but he also captures the power in these myths, pointing toward the deeper horror a monstrous “woman” poses as a potential challenge to global patriarchy.

Paul Edmonds’s “Grand Guignol” takes a somewhat comic turn but continues the gallery’s examination of gender relations. The main character leaves his wife at home for a guys’ night meant for watching dirty movies. His wife thinks they both follow norms for domestic gender propriety, but he’s up for boys will be boys transgression–except the girls in the movie don’t act like girls are supposed to act, and even the movie breaks movie limits. Stacked transgressions result in a display worthy of the story’s title, and gender norms go down in the bloodbath.

Next up is “The Bull” by Mario Senzale, which no one has berated us for publishing… yet. This story is about a crazy, scary, disturbing sexual (mis)adventure into overlapping zones of abjection. It examines the inextricable web formed among the masculine/feminine gender, normative/non-normative sexual, and white/black racial binaries in U.S. culture. It uses explicit sex to engage with the impact of overt racism and internalized racism on masculine and feminine identity–even a person’s sense of humanity. It’s uncomfortable as fuck, and if you enjoy shock, you’ll probably enjoy it.

We conclude with John Davis’s “About a Girl,” and I really don’t think you can go anywhere after this story anyway. Like “Grand Guignol,” it explores boys being boys, but in this story, being one of the boys means being so awful that some of you are going to have trouble finishing the read. Being one of the boys means treating a girl as totally abject. That’s just one level of the horror, the hardest to read. Because of the story’s frame, however, you get another level of horror: reflection on how boys being boys, from a moral perspective, makes the masculine abject. The implications of universal abjection reach a cosmic level as disruption of a binary that seemed like an inevitable structure for the world slides toward the void.

So the human, viewed as an individual or in a social context, gets disrupted in extreme horror, deprived of its sacredness, stripped of its organizing principles, and toppled from its place in the universe. In trampling on humanity in extreme ways, however, horror that tests limits also reveals what you, singular and plural, mean. You see your humanity best when you see it at its worst, stretched to its limits, at or beyond its breaking points. Go ahead. Have a look.

ATTRACTIONS IN THE EXHIBIT

Gallery One: What You Know About Being You

“Brisket” by Marco Herrera (MAHH!). As the title might lead you to imagine, “Brisket” is about meat. Although it refers to others, it is primarily concerned with meat of the human variety, and, as you’ve likely guessed, it earns its three-heart extremity rating by showing the human body cut up like meat. “Brisket” is indeed extreme in imagery (imagine plunging your face into live viscera), but it is perhaps more extreme in philosophy as the surgeon narrator explains–and demonstrates–that people are meat, which makes the difference between living subjectivity and dead objecthood kind of meaningless, perhaps a fiction. But if we’re nothing more than lumps of meat, what if meat’s best quality… its appeal to the appetite… redeems us? What if, from a certain perspective, we can be beautiful… as meat?

“The Canvas” by Maxim Volk. This troubling question about beauty in objecthood becomes troubling in a new way in “The Canvas,” in which a person volunteers to be an object. Crossing from subjectivity to objecthood, from the position of exalted self to monstrous other, isn’t a rare move in transgressive horror: The Forbidden isn’t just a title for a Clive Barker work; it’s a source of allure for characters across his transgressive oeuvre. In a tale with atmosphere reminiscent of Barker, Volk pushes surrender to otherness to a delightful extreme with visceral meditation on sexuality, cravings, and the allure of the taboo. In “The Canvas,” a tattoo artist receives the bizarre commission to treat a bound man’s entire body as a canvas for his art. First they feel some revulsion toward the ordeal, but they gradually find themself ensnared by intense pleasure. It’s a brilliantly uncomfortable exploration of how brittle our mainstream sensibilities become when faced with otherness in all its glory. The story contains a lot of orgasms and naughty ideas, but the imagery is surprisingly mild, and the ideas aren’t pushing the envelope too hard in 2026… thus only two hearts for extremity. A little semen never hurt anyone. Well… in retrospect, maybe we should have given this one three hearts.

“The Black Gut Laugh” by Fendy S. Tulodo. There’s an unspoken consensus among creatives that some ideas, no matter how novel, are simply too “out there” and/or incompatible to work within the same story. That the concepts are so disconnected that there’s seemingly no way for a writer to build the connective tissue necessary for them to work in tandem. Tulodo’s most recent publication in our archive is one of many narratives to reject this sentiment. Wildly diverse elements including tattoos, pregnancy, plastic utensils, a flood, a ventriloquist dummy, and a gargantuan digestive tract come together seamlessly to create one of the strangest worlds we’ve ever showcased. If you think really hard about the imagery, some of it’s really disgusting, but what’s extreme about this story is that its world is so fucked up you might not even notice it’s disgusting. Thus, two hearts. Nobody ever requested a content warning for “mind blowing.” 

Gallery Two: What You Know About Girls and Boys

The Monstrous Feminine: Eighteen Horrorku by Vampirlibido. At this point you might be wondering why the attractions we’ve described haven’t gotten higher extremity ratings. “Brisket” involves a face rubbed in raw viscera. If that’s three hearts, how can a group of poems rate the same level? Maybe you’ve never read poems like these…. Part of their extremity comes from their form: horrorku, or horror haiku. They have some variety, not sticking to the seventeen-syllables-arranged-in-three-lines mandate you might be familiar with, but they all have in common extraordinary brevity and precision. Each evokes a mythological or historical female figure and a violent and/or sexual act. Each cluster of words is an image that works like a dagger of transgression into your mind, the poems arranged as shocks of varying sizes on the theme of women synonymous with horrors in different cultures’ imaginations. The poems revel in those horrors as they hold them up to scrutiny, transgressing in both revelry and in questioning the revelry. The work is a whole. Eighteen nasty little experiences add up to a surprisingly coherent vision of nastiness.

“Grand Guignol” by Paul Edmonds. Four hearts. Surely, it’s a bloodbath! Well, yeah, actually. The story has what you could consider a literal bloodbath in it. Those elevator doors opening and unleashing a blood flood in the movie The Shining? This story goes further. Chunky bodies float around in it. And that’s not even the grossest thing. It has torture and weird sex stuff. In short, it delivers on the promise of its title, “Grand Guignol,” which refers to a sex-and-slaughter-focused French theatre (and form of theatre) that grew up at the end of the nineteenth century, kept popping up in the early twentieth, and–some say–merged with the horror film’s splattery side (not to mention dubious porn). This bit of Grand Guignol, surprisingly, takes place in the 1980s-ish suburbs, however. A bunch of guys are looking to get off watching a kinky sex tape while taking a night off from their family responsibilities.The aforementioned Grand Guignol circumstances come about due to a mysterious video tape. So, in short, it’s extreme analog horror that evokes nineteenth-century theatre and provides historical commentary on gender norms in the suburbs while also serving up the bloodbath without which an extreme horror exhibit wouldn’t be complete.  

“The Bull” by Mario Senzale. Count them. Five hearts. Two more hearts than the story with face-in-guts and the one with a poem about a woman who fucked forty corpses. And we’ve got to tell you–not a one of these five hearts comes from blood or gore. Before we could publish this story, we felt we had to confer with author Mario Senzale. We requested that he write an introduction to help readers understand its intent (he was happy to do so). While we regretted potentially decreasing the story’s impact, we felt the intro was necessary. Why? Because this story deals with racial relations in the United States, particularly black-white relations, and it does so both referring to and using stereotypes in ways that will offend mainstream sensibilities. It also explores a sexual subculture whose mere conception will offend mainstream sensibilities. The story combines very explicit sex with racism and racist imagery in a manner so disturbing that the tale earns its place as “horror.” You’ve probably never read a horror story like “The Bull.” Just remember that if at any point you feel outraged or horrified… it’s working.

“About a Girl” by John Davis. One of the core differences between extreme horror and mainstream horror is what it chooses to show you. Mainstream horror–quiet, atmospheric horror in particular–approaches taboo topics such as sexual assault via implication. Even if a story goes as far as to show you the moment, it involves a level of restraint that entices you to imagine the worst given what’s on the page. Extreme horror rebels against such subtlety; it takes the opposite approach. While most horror skirts detailed descriptions of the worst human beings can do to one another, extreme horror grabs your chin and forces you to watch the act, to face its horrors. Davis’s contribution to our Exhibit is a brutal example of this type of transgression. In what is arguably the most extreme tale we’ve ever published, a tale that more than earns its five hearts, a circle of boys–eager to affirm their manhood to one another–commits the unspeakable. Read at your own risk.