Introduction and Guide for Nasty Nature

by L. Andrew Cooper and H.J. Dutton

with Silas the Scribble Man, part-time exterminator

Philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in his masterpiece Leviathan (1651), famously claims that humans, in “nature,” without “a common power to keep them all in awe,” will have

…no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man,solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. (1.13.8 – 9)

Whether or not you agree with Hobbes and think humans without civilization, humans in a state of nature, become brutes themselves, and even if you acknowledge that humans are animals, too, you probably perceive a distinction between the realm of humanity and the environments it builds and the realm of “nature” and “natural” environments. And while not everything in the realm of nature is scary, dangerous, and violent, some of it is. 

The rule of nature is survival. So being in nature means facing threats to survival. Encountering natural, brutish things, things that are not like us but that are nevertheless part of our world, triggers our warning mechanisms. Fight or flight. Revulsion. Sure, nature can be beautiful. But the stranger it is, the less we understand it, the more likely it is to be a threat… and the more it is nasty.

It’s the lovely month of May, springtime is in full force, and we welcome you to Horrific Scribes, Special Exhibit Four: Nasty Nature.

We begin with Gallery One: Growths and Infestations, which focuses on natural things that are simultaneously among the most common lifeforms on the planet and the most alien from humankind: bugs and fungi. 

“Bugs” is perhaps the best group word the English language provides for creatures as diverse as insects, arachnids, and worms, the creepy crawlies, living things often tiny in comparison to a human but so different in shape and movement that they often trigger levels of revulsion high enough to approach panic. Amanda M. Blake’s “Nest/Infest” exploits the panicky revulsion brought on by the creepy crawlies with precise and relentless descriptions that trap you along with the protagonist in a hell with way too many legs, sure to stimulate even the smallest bug-phobia to maximum levels. 

The infestation in Alice Yustas’s “Marmite and Mushrooms” parallels the one in “Nest/Infest” to an extent, with fungi instead of bugs, but fungi, which have their own kingdom, the highest level in biologists’ taxonomic arrangement of lifeforms, are arguably even weirder than bugs. They have commonalities with insects and mammals, but they eat outside their bodies and reproduce through both spores and underground networks that can stretch vast distances (which some people think allow them to communicate). Some glow. Some can control the minds of other species. Some make people hallucinate. Some look like human body parts. Some look like they bleed. “Marmite and Mushrooms” explores several of these bizarre fungal qualities.

Emmie Christie’s “Every Nowhere Leads to Somewhere” presents a very different perspective on fungus, as it features a mushroom that (who) is a talking, helpful character. However, the character nevertheless relates to one of the scariest things about fungi: they’re decomposers, and as such, they have an intimate connection with death. Christie’s story explores that connection from an unusual angle.

In Gallery Two: Creepy Critters, as the title suggests, we move from one type of critter to another, coming closer to the human with a focus mostly on mammalian creepers, specifically the critters that tend to show up in suburbs and cities. Tracy Fritz’s “Mr. Ears Comes to Dinner” reflects on how close, or how far, humans are from such critters as the protagonist feeds the raccoons in her backyard and develops a relationship with one of them that might be a mutant. The odd animal “Mr. Ears” reveals flaws in the character’s assumptions about nature… and about herself.

Andrew Nadolny’s “She Is Our Warmth, She Is Our Shelter” further undermines assumptions about animals, beginning with a human perspective but shifting into four-legged perspectives that reveal brutality in some ways comparable to and in other ways radically different from the human. In the end, whether the perspectives–human and natural–are fundamentally different or remotely reconcilable comes into question within a burst of grotesque but beautiful images.

The last Creepy Critters attraction is Thomas C. Mavroudis’s “From a Trail Cam Pointed at Our House,” in which a father investigating his son’s online interests discovers disturbing animal activity in his urban residential enclave. The seemingly ritualistic and increasingly brutal activities of the animals deliver no clear message, but they do suggest that animals, like people, find ways of making meaning that, though confounding, demand attention.

Nasty Nature concludes with a focus on aspects of nature that confound humanity’s definitions of “nature” as such. Gallery Three: Aberrations begins with Lira Palmer’s “Calypso,” about a botanist’s hunt for a rare orchid, but finding the aberrant flower risks succumbing to its aberrant properties. Aberrant nature is the outsider on the outside; like the apparent mutation of Mr. Ears, the aberration at least should trigger a warning of increased threat.

The threat of natural aberrations that John Leahy’s sailors discover in “Flowers” appears, like the “Calypso” orchid, in beautiful, seductive forms–anthropomorphized in ways the fungus stories of Gallery One demonstrate less monstrously. The phenomena of the title are so far from the human understanding of nature that they might be otherworldly.

The two poems combined in Nicholas De Marino’s Living Nightmares, “a swollen metallic dolphin” and “Beach Body,” present animals by the shore, sea creatures and birds, in states of dissolution and transformation, defying human understanding of nature by refusing stability in form, time, and space. Aberration here undermines notions not just of “nature” but of “lifeform” and “life” itself.

The Exhibit’s final attraction is Alistair Rey’s delightful “Snails,” one of the shortest stories in the Horrific Scribes archive, about a very unusual… snail… that hides a threat related to… snails. Your reaction will be a laugh, a WTF, maybe (hopefully) both.

Please enjoy our display of Nasty Nature.

Gallery One: Growths and Infestations

“Nest/Infest” – Amanda M. Blake. This story will very likely make you formicate.

formication (noun): an abnormal sensation resembling that made by insects creeping in or on the skin – merriam-webster.com

Most stories are fairly limited in their sensory appeals, focusing on visual images and some sounds, maybe tossing in an odor or two, but Blake goes full-five, with special assaults on the tactile, in her tale of a woman who goes to a guy’s apartment for a one-night stand and finds out too late that their temporary love nest is, indeed, infested by every kind of creepy crawly imaginable. Part of this story’s genius is its length: the onslaught of the bugs goes on way too long, way past endurance, to a point of emotional shredding where you might not notice all the other smart things the story does. That the protagonist journeys from sterility to filth shortly after the COVID pandemic is no coincidence; the tale reflects on changing ideas about “nests” and “bugs” since the experience of lockdown and the accompanying paranoia about infection. It also reflects on changing attitudes about sex and safety, STDs and other risks that come from other people. Human sexual urges… nesting urges… have a counterpart in the way bugs nest and infest. Although the story’s frank treatment of female desire has an unusual equalizing effect as far as desire among humans is concerned, maybe in the world of “Nest/Infest,” all reproductive sexuality, all life spawning according to base instincts, is dirty.

“Marmite and Mushrooms” – Alice Yustas. As in “Nest/Infest,” in Yustas’s tale a manifestation of the messiness and chaos of the natural world, in this case a fungus, has conquered a human domestic space. Not only the appearance of the fungus but also its desecration of a space meant to be devoid of the wild outside its walls disgust the characters who come across it. Yet despite this revulsion, one of the characters feels a peculiar fascination for the growth–enough to take a piece of it home with him. This decision, of course, involves a very poor estimation of nature’s potential, and it comes with disastrous consequences that involve unexpected thrills.

“Every Nowhere Leads to Somewhere” – Emmie Christie. Much of nature is–and always will be–gross. It’s a squirming, pulsing, throbbing, oozing, secreting, slithering, scuttling thing. As Earth’s primary decomposers, fungi are inextricable from death and decay, which, given most humans’ crippling fear of the end, tends to put us at aesthetic and visceral odds with the fungal kind (except, maybe, when it’s on pizza). Christie’s story, like “Marmite and Mushrooms,” represents the fungus, but Christie defies the typical grossness and makes her mushroom a friendly, talking character that reaches out to a distraught little girl. The mushroom still represents the processes of death, but the mushroom’s perspective helps the girl see and understand her situation. The fungus is, like death, natural; perhaps it only needs to become more familiar for people to manage its horrors.

“Húsið Mitt” – Steve Toase. Wait a minute… the main introduction didn’t even mention this story. What’s it doing here? The title, “Húsið Mitt,” means “My House” in Icelandic, and in the story, it’s the name of the restaurant where a group of old friends go expecting an unusual dining experience. This story doesn’t belong in this gallery like the others do because it doesn’t focus on bugs or fungus. Mold does make an appearance. Though it ventures away from the Exhibit’s unifying elements, like “Nest/Infest” and “Marmite and Mushrooms,” it is interested in appetites and disgust. It will likely assault your palette, your sense of taste, in a way comparable to the formication brought on by “Nest/Infest,” and it might make you think about your aesthetic assumptions in a way similar to “Every Nowhere Leads to Somewhere.” However, it is surreal, abrupt, and fairly brutal–the most extreme story in this Exhibit. It’s about eating and the limits of eating. And it’s nasty. To understand fully, you have to read it.

Gallery Two: Creepy Critters

“Mr. Ears Comes to Dinner” – Tracy Fritz. You could read this story twice and have totally different experiences. The first time through, you might focus on the creepy critter elements. The main character, Alison, feeds the raccoons in her backyard and bonds with them. When a strange-looking animal shows up, an animal she figures must be a raccoon even though she’s never seen anything like it, the bond she forms is especially close. This new critter is ugly, but it’s smart… and it seems to want to cross the boundary to get inside her home, inside her life, to cross from nature territory into human territory with a threat that Alison is slow to understand because Alison’s fondness for nature comes from an ignorance that blinds her to how nasty it can be. That’s enough good material for a horror story, but Fritz also provides a psychological tale about a woman who has surrendered a successful career to be a homemaker in the suburbs while her husband pursues his career. Alison might not understand that she’s trying fill an emotional void by taking care of animals and that the attractions of her new animal visitor play directly into her psychological vulnerability. What she actually gets from the animals–and what results from psychological projection–isn’t entirely clear. This second story is the story of someone whose psychological deterioration gets mixed up with misunderstandings about nature. Both stories in “Mr. Ears Comes to Dinner” can work together, of course. You might have to accept that the animal on the outside and the animal on the inside are, at times, indistinguishable.

“She Is Our Warmth, She Is Our Shelter” – Andrew Nadolny. One of the main characters in Nadolny’s story is, like Mr. Ears is supposed to be, a raccoon, but Nadolny goes where Fritz doesn’t. While Mr. Ears is inscrutable, a mystery like nature itself often is in horror stories, Nadolny shows you the life and appetites of a raccoon from multiple perspectives, including the raccoon’s own. It starts in the point of view of a human, who, with callousness and brutality, reflects the human assumption about animals’ inscrutability after a violent encounter by saying, “I don’t know why stupid fucking animals have to do stupid fucking shit like that.” The switch to the raccoon’s perspective is anything but sentimental. Also callous and brutal, the animal is preoccupied with how far its ability to kill might reach. The final perspective completes the scene with the shared mentality of an animal group that has an almost ritualistic purpose dependent on and inseparable from the surrounding violence. While it renders animal minds accessible, “She Is Our Warmth, She Is Our Shelter” doesn’t bring them any closer to human civility. If anything, civility vanishes, and we’re all united in brutality.

“From a Trail Cam Pointed at Our House” – Thomas C. Mavroudis. Human relationships with nature often involve contradictory feelings of hatred and longing: we would repel nature, keeping it definitively outside human space, but we also long for the wildness we have banished in the name of civilization. Mavroudis’s story creates a poignant parallel between a father’s attempt to connect with his mentally isolated son by watching the internet videos that absorb so much of his son’s attention and the strange connection with “natural” creatures outside his house that the videos reveal. Like his son’s behavior, the animals’ behavior strikes him as odd, incomprehensible… but what he sees on the videos escalates, becoming violent, ritualistic, seeming to have meaning of an order beyond his grasp. Mavroudis doesn’t offer easy answers to bridge the gap between humanity and nature, or between father and son, but he does suggest that the breadth of those gaps might be less than we might tend, or even like, to imagine.

Gallery Three: Aberrations

“Calypso” – Lira Palmer. Botanical horror, even when its frightening plant phenomena, as in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844), derive from science, often flirts with elements from the ghost story: Hawthorne’s title character seems both haunting and haunted. In Gothic fiction, plants and natural landscapes often symbolize the past’s encroachment upon the present; in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Giant Wisteria” (1891), the titular wisteria vine parallels a haunting in its conquest of a historic property. Palmer’s foray into botanical horror blends the scientific with supernatural atmosphere both in its structure, which alternates between informational extracts and the perspective of the main character, and in its story, which relates how the main character, a botanist, experiences bizarre and threatening changes as she gets closer and closer to finding the rare orchid she seeks.

“Flowers” – John Leahy. Christie’s “Every Nowhere Leads to Somewhere” presents an aesthetic challenge, turning the grossness of a fungus’s association with death into something beneficial, perhaps even beautiful. “Flowers” approaches a comparable aesthetic challenge from another direction: it turns one of nature’s beautiful, generally unthreatening sides into something gross, making its attractiveness deadly. Among nature’s more unnerving predators is the mimic, a category of organisms that have evolved means to lure in prey with the image of something they need or desire. In Leahy’s story, the mimics are quite evolved indeed… and the main characters, sailors starved for female companionship, are eager to respond to the ways they appeal to men’s desires for beauty.

Living Nightmares – Nicholas De Marino. The first of the two poems in Living Nightmares, “a swollen metallic dolphin,” presents a creature of the title description on the sand, mutilated, probably dead, a confrontation for the poem’s speaker. The confrontation might arouse disgust, but the speaker doesn’t indicate an emotional reaction; instead, the speaker brings the creature home, mingling the alienating specimen from nature with the domestic human interior (a tub). Interaction leads to melting, blending, breakdown between nature and human and ultimately role reversal with what might be movement backward in time. Aberration leads to boundary violation, which leads to deeper aberration and greater boundary violation, and so on. “Beach Body” adds a twist to the cycle of aberration and boundary violation, starting in the perspective of an inhuman creature that, when devoured, goes through transformations that expand beyond the limits of nature and life as traditionally understood. Surreal and fascinating, earning the label “body horror” if bodies without limits are horrifying, these poems distort images from nature to undo secure senses of the natural.

“Snails” – Alistair Rey. If we make an exception for buttery escargot like we did for mushrooms on pizza, we can say that, in general, humans have a particular contempt for land-based mollusks. This prejudice is at least somewhat justified. Similar to the way we associate fungi with death and decomposition, we have a defense mechanism, a behavioral immune system, that associates snails and slugs with decay and disease, an association backed up by mollusks’ tendency to carry parasites. This association, coupled with their sliminess and a penchant for fucking up gardens, places them alongside bugs in the dreaded “creepy crawly” category. Rey’s story plays visceral disgust for the mollusk to maximum effect. A medical student is called to a basement morgue to inspect a recently discovered specimen. Unbeknownst to him and the morgue’s staff, the body still harbors life. What Rey depicts is an aberration, but it’s a suitable end for this Exhibit because it poses this question: what if the nastiest thing about nature is its plenitude? In a game of numbers, the creepy crawlies win against humans every time. What if the greatest horror of nature is that there’s so damned much of it?

SPECIAL EXHIBIT FOUR: Return to the “Order of Attractions“

Begin Gallery One: Growths and Infestations with “Nest/Infest“