A Joyce Carol Oates Patchwork
The stories not only bleed across the categorical boundaries they have been assigned, but also expand the scope of what is terrifying about the body—living or dead, human or nonhuman—in the first place.
New York: Akashic Books, 2023
266 Pages
While the common belief is that “body horror” as a subgenre of horror fiction dates back to the 1970s, Joyce Carol Oates suggests that Medusa, the snake-haired gorgon in Greek mythology, is the “quintessential emblem of female body horror.”
In A Darker Shade of Noir: New Stories of Body Horror by Women Writers, Oates has assembled a spectacular cast to explore this subgenre focusing on distortions to the human body in the most fascinating of ways.
“Should we know nothing of the female monsters of antiquity, still we would know that body horror in its myriad manifestations speaks most powerfully to women and girls. To be female is to inhabit a body that is by nature vulnerable to forcible invasion, susceptible to impregnation and repeated pregnancies, condemned to suffer childbirth, often in the past early deaths in childbirth and in the aftermath of childbirth.”
—Joyce Carol Oates, from the Introduction
Cover and interior artwork by Laurel Hausler.
ContentsIntroduction by Joyce Carol Oates
PART I: You’ve Created A Monster
PART II: Morbid Anatomy
PART III: Out of Body, Out of Time
Megan Abbott is the Edgar Award-winning author of ten crime novels, including You Will Know Me, Give Me Your Hand, the New York Times best seller The Turnout, and, most recently, Beware the Woman. She also writes for television, including Dare Me, the series she adapted from her own novel, now streaming on Netflix.
Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testaments, which was a global number one best seller and won the Booker Prize. In 2020 she published Dearly, her first collection of poetry in a decade, followed in 2022 with Burning Questions, a selection of essays from 2004-2021. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
Aimee Bender is the author of six books of fiction, including the best seller The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake and the New York Times Notable Book The Color Master. Her work has been translated into sixteen languages, and she teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California.
Tananarive Due is an award-winning author who teaches Black Horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA. She is an executive producer on Shudder’s groundbreaking documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror. She and her husband/collaborator Steven Barnes wrote “A Small Town” for Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone, and the graphic novel The Keeper, illustrated by Marco Finnegan. Due’s short story collection The Wishing Pool and Other Stories was published by Akashic Books in 2023.
Elizabeth Hand is the author of twenty award-winning novels and five collections of short fiction. She is a longtime contributor of book reviews and essays to the Washington Post, among many other places. A Haunting on the Hill, a follow-on to Shirley Jackson’s classic The Haunting of Hill House, was published in 2023. Hand teaches at the Stonecoast MFA program in creative writing, and divides her time between the coast of Maine and North London.
Laurel Hausler is a mixed-media artist from the Washington, DC, area who paints the dark prom of life. Her ghostly work is shown and collected internationally. Her artwork is included in the anthology Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers, edited byJoyce Carol Oates.
Cassandra Khaw is an award-winning game writer. Their recent novella Nothing but Blackened Teeth was, a British Fantasy, World Fantasy, Shirley Jackson, and Bram Stoker Award finalist. Their debut collection Breakable Things is now out.
Sheila Kohler is the author of eleven novels, three collections of short stories, and the memoir Once We Were Sisters. Her work has been translated and published widely abroad. She has taught creative writing at Columbia University and Princeton. Her novel Cracks has been filmed with Jordan Scott as director, Ridley Scott as executive producer, and starring Eva Green, and is being reissued by Open Road in 2023.
Aimee Labrie’s short stories have appeared in the Minnesota Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, StoryQuarterly, Cimarron Review, Pleiades, Beloit Fiction Journal, Pemufrost Magazine, and other venues. In 2007, her short story collection Wonderful Girl was awarded the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. Her short stories have been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. She works as the senior program coordinator and an instructor for the Writers House at Rutgers University.
Raven Leilani is a National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree, and the recipient of the 2020 Kirkus Prize, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, NBCC’s John Leonard Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Clark Fiction Prize, and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. She teaches at NYU, and Luster is her first novel.
Lisa Lim is a comic storyteller bom and raised in Queens, New York. Her work has been featured in Guernica, PANK, the Rumpus, PEN America, and Mutha Magazine. Find more of her storytelling at lisalimcomics.com
Joanna Margaret holds a PhD in history from the University of St. Andrews, an MFA in creative writing from NYU, and a BA in French and history from Columbia University. She has taught history at the University of St. Andrews and the University of Dundee. She is the author of the novel The Bequest. She lives and writes in New York City.
Valerie Martin is the author of eleven novels, including Mary Reilly, which won the Kafka Prize; Property, winner of the Women’s Prize; and, most recently, I Give It to You, as well as four collections of short fiction, and a biography of St. Francis of Assisi. She has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She resides in Madison, Connecticut.
Joyce Carol Oates is the author of a number of works of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. She is the editor of New Jersey Noir, Prison Noir, and Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers, and a recipient of the National Book Award, PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Humanities Medal, and a World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Yumi Dineen Shiroma is a PhD student in English at Rutgers University, studying postcolonial and queer theories and literatures. Her poetry has appeared in BOMB, Hyperallergic, Peach Mag and Nat. Brut. She lives in Philadelphia with Signora Neroni the cat.
Lisa Tuttle began writing professionally in the 1970s. Although she also writes novels and nonfiction, her preference is for the weird short story. Her most recent collection is The Dead Hours of Night. Bom and raised in Texas, she has lived in Scotland for many years.
ReviewsLucy Roehring, Booklist, July 1, 2023
[Oates] writes in her introduction that body horror speaks to the female body, as the male patriarchy accuses women of being too arousing or not feminine enough. Within these stories lies the discomfort so many females have with their own bodies…. Those looking for horror stories with a feminist spin will love the combination of talent in this book.
Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2023
… the stories not only bleed across the categorical boundaries they have been assigned, but also expand the scope of what is terrifying about the body—living or dead, human or nonhuman—in the first place…. A bold collection of horror stories that flies in the face of both gender and genre conventions.
Publishers Weekly, July 31, 2023, page 42-43
Oates has a broad take on the body horror subgenre, and while some stories use the anthology’s premise to devastating advantage, others don’t quite fit the bill…. Still, the thematic probe into bodily autonomy makes this a must-read for fans of feminist horror.
Image: detail from “High School” by Laurel Hausler
I'm a Reference Librarian at the University of San Francisco's Gleeson Library, and I run the Joyce Carol Oates web site, Celestial Timepiece.
Celestial Timepiece 
Same as Paula! Reposting and preordering.
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Can hardly wait to dive into this one. What a great cast of authors! I’m addicted to story stories. Thank you.
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