Body Horror/Literature: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

* The Melding Plague in [[Alastair Reynolds]]' ''Revelation Space'' trilogy. It's totally harmless if you're a baseline human, but if you have any advanced technology ([[Nanotechnology]]) in you, it will infect those and cause them to rapidly fail and go out of control. In ''Chasm City'', a character mentions that if you have those implants in your head, your head will [[Your Head Asplode|explode]]. And it can infect advanced buildings and vehicles as well. In Chasm City, inhabitants of high-tech buildings were [[And I Must Scream|trapped in the walls, visibly screaming in terror]]. The survivors of the disaster don't know if it's possible to revive them.

** Also from the Revelation Space universe - Nightingale, a {{spoiler|[[A.I. Is a Crapshoot|quite insane medical AI]] that creates artistic statements against war using living human beings as its medium.}}

** In fact, [[The Spoony Experiment|Spoony]] argues that the only person who could direct a faithful screen adaptation of it is David Cronenberg (see [[Body Horror/Film|Film]]).

* In ''[[Discworld]]'', Angua's [[Our Werewolves Are Different|breed of werewolf]] can look like either a normal human or a normal wolf, but the few seconds of transition between the two is so horrific that she never lets anyone see it if she can help it. (This being a novel series, we have to [[Take Our Word for It|Take Their Word For It]], and we're glad to do so.)

* The ''[[Mistborn]]'' series by Brandon Sanderson includes some of this; the process of Hemalurgy, specifically, {{spoiler|involves killing a person in order to transfer his or her powers (and/or soul) to another person by piercing them with a piece of metal, usually a large spike.}} This results in {{spoiler|Steel Inquisitors, whose creation involves having gigantic metal spikes ''[[Eye Scream|shoved into their eyes]],'' among other places, and who are easily controlled by a [[Cosmic Horror|dark god]]}} and {{spoiler|Koloss, who the Hemalurgy mutates into monstrous, inhuman war machines whose skin is replaced by that of a different Koloss and which never grows larger (thus a newly-created Koloss will have baggy skin that would fall off if it weren't fastened on with spikes, and the oldest and largest Koloss have skin that has stretched so far that it's torn off of them).}}

* Scott Smith's novel ''[[The Ruins]]'': When a character thinks that the man-eating vines are ''growing underneath his skin'' and begins obsessively cutting himself open to try and get rid of the tendrils. The worst part? {{spoiler|HE'S NOT HALLUCINATING.}}

* ''Discord in Scarlet'', a short story by [[A. E. van Vogt]] that was incorporated into the novel ''Voyage of the Space Beagle'', which was the inspiration for ''[[Alien (franchise)|Alien]]''.

* In the later books of ''[[The Wheel of Time]]'', there is body horror all over the place when the Dark One's prison weakens and he can begin to "touch the world". [[It Got Worse|What's worse]] is that it always strikes out of NOWHERE. One man is feverish and then suddenly bursts into flame and slowly burns to death. Some people are found as charred corpses in their beds. Another guy explodes into a swarm of bugs. There are several more as well.

* At the end of the first book of ''[[A Dirge for Prester John]]'', Brother Hiobe has a plant start to grow out of his mouth from a mysterious flower he ingests. By the start of the next book, it has grown all over him, wrapping around his body to the point where the new narrator can't figure out if it's growing out of more of him or not. And it keeps ''getting bigger''. And, it's implied, takes over his mind.