Body Horror/Literature: Difference between revisions

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

** Reynolds' short story "Diamond Dogs" has the main character being slowly and ''voluntarily'' turned from a human into a cybernetic dog like creature. Unfortunately, the doctor who did this took himself apart so he wouldn't have to undo his "greatest work".

* The main character in ''Treason'' by Orson Scott Card, Lanik Mueller, is a radical regenerative who grows extra genitalia, arms, heads, everything. He winds up growing a clone of himself and freaks out.

* Acheri, and Offal, from ''[[Hells Children|Hell's Children]]'', are body horror incarnate.

* ''[[Thinner]]'' by [[Stephen King]] had this as its general theme.

** ''[[The Tommyknockers]]'' had some teeth-losing, skin transparent...ing, ''genital morphing'' hideousness. It was inspired by ''The Colour Out Of Space'' (see below), as King is a huge Lovecraft fan.

** The short story "Gray Matter" (appears in the collection ''[[Night Shift]]'') is about a son watching his father slowly turns into a vaguely humanoid fungus creature due to drinking too much tainted beer. The concept might sound a little silly, but the descriptions of his gradual transformation certainly aren't.

*** This story is a homage to Arthur Machen's classic tale "The White Powder", a much more horrific and completely unfunny version of the same phenomenon.

* Several instances in [[A Song of Ice and Fire]]:

** The disease greyscale. It causes the flesh to calcify and crack, then insanity then eventually death.

** The way Vargo Hoat dies in ''A Feast for Crows.''

* Jean-Paul Sartre's existential novel ''Nausea'' gruesomely delves into imaginary body horror when the protagonist narrates his daydream of what might happen if reality suddenly began to defy people's expectations of it. A bloody lump of [[Nausea Fuel|half-rotted meat]] dragging itself across the street, a child's cheek splitting open to reveal scattered eyes growing [[Eyes Do Not Belong There|out of his face]], and people waking up to find their tongues partly changed into wriggling centipedes are just the beginning of his imagined apocalypse. Even then, he realizes people would still find a way to categorize the world around them, coming up with new names and meanings for these horrors like "stone-eye, great three-cornered arm, toe-crutch, spider-jaw."