Body Horror/Literature: Difference between revisions

* ''[[The Stone Dance of the Chameleon]]'' runs on this trope. The Masters are completely obsessed with ritual mutilation. If common people see a Master unmasked, the least horrible punishment is [[Eye Scream|being blinded]]. There's an entire caste of people who have one eye plucked out at birth. Likewise, pregnant women are sometimes administered a poison that makes them more likely to give birth to [[Conjoined Twins]], one of which is always blinded at birth. Then there's a different people, the Marula, whose oracles commune with their god by having maggots burrow through their own flesh. Most grotesque of all, however, are the Wise, a political faction of the Masters. These people are stripped of all their senses except touch - eyes, nose and tongue and even ''eardrums'' are cut out. They are also castrated and communicate with the outer world through a homunculus, a personal slave whose growth has been deliberately stunted. By pressing the homunculus' throat in a certain way, they can relay what they want to see through the homunculus, who will speak for them.

* The main characters in ''[[Scorpion Shards]]'' are subject to some gross disfigurements by the [[Eldritch Abomination]] parasites that infect them. In particular, Tory develops an extreme case of painful and disgusting acne, and Lourdes gains so much weight that [[Up to Eleven|paper airplanes curve around her gravitational field]].

* The [[Big Bad]] of ''[[Rivers of London]]'' takes [[Demonic Possession|possession]] of it's hosts, then turns their face into {{spoiler|a lookalike of [[Punch and Judy|Mister Punch]] with the giant hooked nose and chin}} shattering the jaw and shredding the skin. Then when it is finished with its host, their face literally falls off. Oh, and they are still alive at the time it happens.

** In the sequel ''[[Moon Over Soho]]'' the Black Magici...sorry, [[Insistent Terminology|Ethically Challenged Magician]] keeps a severed head alive, conscious and enslaved for over four decades, plus has a sideline in creating real [[Catgirl|CatGirls]] by fusing people and with actual cats. There is worse, but Nightingale tells viewpoint character Peter Grant that he [[You Do NOT Want to Know|doesn't want to know]] and Grant decides to accept this since the clean up crew has to involve people who excavate war graves in Rwanda and Kosovo.