The Mammoth Book of Body Horror

by Marie O'Regan

  He negotiated the torrent of doors and found the beer garden – little more than a few chairs on a fire-escape landing – upstairs. His dad was asleep. Charlie sat next to him and pressed his hand into the seldom-known depth of his father’s. It was sunny in the beer garden, and very warm. A different world. Within minutes he was asleep himself, and when his dad shook him awake much later, the pair of them uncomfortable and hot and striped with mild sunburn, his first thought was not of the man in the toilet, whom he would never see again, but of concern for his dad, who was swearing about being late home for tea.

  Sam came up to him and kissed his cheek as if they were longtime lovers. He felt himself cower beneath that peck, and hated himself for it, at the same time made dizzy by her fresh smell, and the momentary press of her breast against his arm.

  She made figure-of-eight shapes on the table with the base of her glass of cider. She was trying to give up smoking and was always edgy and distracted during the first twenty minutes of entering a pub and having a drink. Cider without that first cigarette was a tough ask, but she was butching it out. She was telling him about a photograph she’d had to caption that afternoon. A picture of a woman pretend-kissing a pair of Y-fronts. The article was all about a woman from Melton Mowbray who was addicted to sex – or, rather, the male generative organ. She had albums of pictures, and plaster casts all around the house. They’d been tossing around ideas for an hour, until most of them were creased up with laughter. It was this part of the job she loved most.

  “I was going to go with cock-a-hoop, but Will said penile dementia, which just slew me. Jenny came up with the best one, but it was too obscure, according to she-who-must-be-obeyed. Pork sigh. You know, pork pie? Melton Mowbray? What do you think?”

  “Very good,” Welch said, but his voice was strained. He didn’t like this prurient side to the job, which was unavoidable, especially when working on what was basically a lad’s mag with aspirations. It might be called Gent, but it was still all about tits and bums and football.

  “What would you have come up with?” she asked. “You left too soon. You missed all the fun.”

  She was teasing him, and he knew that, but it didn’t prevent his cheeks from burning. “Nothing anywhere near as good.”

  “Go on,” she said. “You’re up against a deadline. We go to press in one minute. What’s your best shot?”

  “I haven’t got one.” He thought of the toilet door swinging open, and the man standing there, his finger and thumb encircling the meaty head of his penis. Everything is OK. OK. OK.

  “Time’s running out. Think dick.”

  “Sam, please—” You filfy lickul cunt.

  “Ten seconds remaining.”

  “I can’t!” Welch stood up and the chair he’d been sitting on toppled to the floor.

  The pub chatter ceased. Into that pocket of silence, before it began again, he apologized, and stalked out, head down, grateful for the sunglasses. He was shaken by the way events kept chasing the tail of his thoughts and memories. It was as if he were somehow initiating them, summoning them, even.

  He bashed his shoulder hard against the doorframe as he went out into the night. He could hear Sam coming after him, calling his name, but he no longer wanted company. He just wanted to get home and go to sleep and rid himself of this furious pain. He ignored her pleas to slow down, and her exasperated apologies. He was sure Sam didn’t know where he lived; he couldn’t deal with the knock at the door this evening. He was drunk, though not enough to wipe clean the dirt that had been revealed on the windows of his mind. He broke into a trot, and put distance, and streets, between them. He turned this way and that until he was lost in a little warren of back alleys and dead ends abutting a warehouse. A lovers’ lane, though the broken glass and litter suggested it would be a better place to die.

  He sat down on a discarded milk crate and blinked at the glistening asphalt, shaking at the memory that had opened up within him. You started feeling below par, you started feeling sorry for yourself, you became a conduit for all kinds of bad feeling. His mother had warned him. This is how cancer begins. This is where the necrosis in the heart originates. Sad faces equals early graves. Don’t allow that inner being to flex its muscles. Don’t let it grow, because it will fill you up, and it will need more space. It will want to get out.

  He thought of how he had grown. He had been stunted, he believed, by a disinterested father, who spent his weekends away from the arc-welder, immersed in the Racing Post and the Daily Mirror, and a mother who was so panicked about keeping him safe that he could not move for all the symbolic cotton wool with which she swaddled him. He was never allowed to play out; if he wanted to see his friends, they had to visit. Social interaction at a minimum, there was only ever going to be one way to develop. It was only when he made the decision to escape that he was able to put himself in a position to challenge the crushing shyness that had held him back for so long. But even so, he saw how others lived their lives and he found himself regretting choices he had made, or not made, people he had failed to make connections with who could have been friends or lovers; chances to travel that were spurned. Opportunities were missed, or never recognized as such. Now he was heading towards his thirties and there was little in his life that he could put a tick next to. He was drifting; freefalling.

  Welch stared down this cobbled back alley, with its shining puddles of oil-infected rainwater, its beer cans and bulging bin sacks. It was all softened, made palatable, by the blur of his eyes. You could be witness to anything, blunted like this. Everything was sinister. There were no friendly shapes. The pain had become so known to him now, it was like the hum of a refrigerator, always there, but something he could filter out. He thought he could hear footsteps, still, but it might have been anything. It might have been the rain falling on the corrugated-iron roof of the warehouse nearby, or the beat of his own pain, treading a furrow into the meat behind his eyes.

  It was increasing, though, this pain, swelling beyond what he was used to. He drew himself upright and staggered, mewling, into the main street where the lights splintered in his eyes and they could not have been more agonizing had they been real needles. All he could see when he closed them was a flicker-show of horror: his father walking past him with an expression on his face that might have been do I know you?; the clenched man in the cubicle; Sam easing down his jeans to find only a sexless curve of skin.

  The supermarket windows provided a wall of glass in which he could watch his own blurred, misshapen form stumble and trip. He came to a stop in front of it and held out his hands as if for help from his reflection. He called for his mother, though she was dead fifteen years. But here she came, a frantic, fraught shade in the blazing back-streets of his mind, trying to stitch shut the apertures of his body so that nobody bad could escape. There was panic creased into her features. He couldn’t speak. His mouth was a criss-cross of thin leather. He was deaf. He couldn’t smell the exhaust fumes in the road, or the rotting waste in the skip outside the supermarket. She was trying to say something, shouting at him, but he could not hear. Carmine lipstick bled into the creases around her fear-frozen mouth. Charlie! It’s bad! Keep it hidden! Close your eyes! Close your eyes!

  He turned and, through the gummy caul of his sight, everything was still hazy, yet he saw more than enough detail to last him what little lifetime he had left, as his agonies reached a point he could never return from, and the filth-rimmed fingertips within began to pick a way through.

  The Contributors

  The Contributors

  In 1985, winning the Critics’ Award at the Cannes Film Festival, STUART GORDON surprised audiences with his first feature film Re-Animator. With its stunning box office success, the movie has become a cult classic and its director has developed a strong and loyal following. His professional career began in 1970 as artistic director of The Organic Theater Company of Chicago, a position he held for fifteen years. Gordon was able to work directly with Ray Bradbury, Roald Dahl, Mary R
enault and Kurt Vonnegut bringing their works to the stage. And in 1974 he produced and directed the world premiere of David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago. The company performed on and off-Broadway, and toured the US and Europe. Gordon left Organic in 1985 when he was offered a three picture deal in Los Angeles after the success of Re-Animator. His films encompass many genres: horror in Dolls (1987), From Beyond (1986) and Dagon (2001); comedy with The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit (1998) and Spacetruckers (1996); crime in King of the Ants (2003) Edmond (2005) and Stuck (2007); and action with Fortress (1993) and Robot Jox (1990). But what all of his work has in common is a darkly humorous point of view and a tendency to shock and surprise. Gordon is also the co-creator of Honey, I Shrunk The Kids (1989), and co-author of Bodysnatchers (1993) and The Dentist (1996). He lives in Los Angeles with his actress wife Carolyn.

  MARY SHELLEY (1797–1851) is most famous for her Gothic horror story Frankenstein, conceived after having a half-waking nightmare while staying with her husband – Percy Bysshe Shelley – and Lord Byron on the shore of Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816. Encouraged to expand upon her original idea, the novel of Frankenstein was published in 1818 and opened a floodgate of imitations. Later, many film and TV adaptations followed, the most well known of which are James Whale’s 1931 movie, starring Boris Karloff as the monster, Hammer’s 1957 film The Curse of Frankenstein, starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, and Kenneth Branagh’s Frankenstein from 1994. Mary Shelley was also the author of a number of other novels, however, including Lodore, Falkner, Perkin Warbeck and The Last Man, which centred around the destruction of mankind.

  EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809–49) is possibly one of the best-known genre writers of all time. He saw himself as primarily a poet (his most famous poem probably remains “The Raven”), but it is with his tales of mystery and imagination that he has become synonymous. Stories such as “The Masque of the Red Death”, “The Pit and the Pendulum”, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, “The Black Cat” and, of course, “The Tell-Tale Heart” have cemented his place in horror history. But some critics have also labelled him the originator of the detective story (due to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”), while others see him as an early forerunner in the science-fiction genre. Greatly admired and imitated, his work has been adapted for film and television many times, most notably by Universal studios in the 1930s, Roger Corman in the 1960s and by the Italian master of suspense Dario Argento and Night of the Living Dead director George A. Romero in the 1990s.

  H. P. LOVECRAFT (1890–1937) has made a staggering contribution to the horror genre which cannot be denied. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Howard Phillips Lovecraft had a great interest in astronomy and was a self-confessed antiquarian. His first stories were published in amateur presses, but then his horror tales began to appear in pulp magazines in the 1920s, such as Weird Tales, as well as a number of hardback anthologies. Sadly, he passed away well before his time, but his name was kept alive by Arkham House publishers, who also encouraged new works by other authors based upon his mythologies – especially as part of The Cthulhu Mythos. Today his fiction is recognized all around the globe, and has been the basis or inspiration for untold spin-off books, comics (most recently Alan Moore’s Necronomicon), collectibles, role-playing and computer games, TV shows and films (in particular those written and directed by Stuart Gordon: From Beyond, Dagon and of course Re-Animator . . .)

  JOHN W. CAMPBELL (1910–71) was an editor and writer credited with helping to shape “The Golden Age of Science Fiction”. As editor of Astounding Science Fiction (later Analog Science Fiction and Fact) from 1937 until his death, he published authors such as Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon and Isaac Asimov, to name but a few. But it was with his own fiction that Campbell carved a career out for himself, after “When the Atoms Failed” appeared in the January 1930 issue of Amazing Stories. Though he wrote many stories (collected in books such as: The Moon is Hell, 1951; The Planeteers, 1966; and The Space Beyond, 1976) and novels like The Mightiest Machine 1947; The Incredible Planet, 1949; and The Ultimate Weapon, 1966, he is perhaps best known for his novella Who Goes There?, first published in the pages of Astounding’s August 1938 issue under the name of Don A. Stuart. It was originally filmed back in 1951 by Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks as The Thing From Another World. Shortening this to just The Thing, John Carpenter – director of Halloween – delivered a remake in 1982 that has become many horror fans’ favourite movie of all time. A prequel film starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead was released in 2011. In 1996, Campbell was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, and both the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer were named in his honour.

  GEORGE LANGELAAN (1908–1972) was a British journalist and writer, born in Paris, France. During the Second World War, Langelaan worked as a spy for the Allied forces, actually undergoing plastic surgery to alter his appearance in order to be dropped into occupied France. His exploits can be read about in his memoirs The Masks of War (1959). After the war he began writing novels and short stories, the most famous of which is “The Fly” – which first appeared in the June 1957 issue of Playboy. Picked up by Hollywood, this was swiftly developed into a movie directed by Kurt Neumann and starring Vincent Price, which premiered in 1958. It spawned the sequels Return of the Fly (1959) and Curse of the Fly (1965). The director of Rabid and Scanners, David Cronenberg, updated the original in 1986 – which starred Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis – and it went on to become not only a smash hit, but one of the big Body Horror films of the 1980s. This received its own follow-up, continuing the story in The Fly II (1989). Other adaptations of Langelaan’s work include the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode “Strange Miracle” (1962), the Night Gallery episode “The Hand of Borgus Weems” (1971 – based on his short story “The Other Hand”) and the 1975 film Hyperion.

  The New York Times bestseller RICHARD MATHESON is the author of many novels and stories of suspense, fantasy, horror and science fiction, including I Am Legend, Hell House, Somewhere in Time, The Shrinking Man, A Stir of Echoes, Duel, Now You See It and What Dreams May Come. He has also written many scripts for feature film and television, including fourteen of the original Twilight Zone episodes. A Grand Master of Horror and past winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement, he has also won the Edgar, the Hugo, the Spur and the Writer’s Guild awards. He lives in Calabasas, California.

  STEPHEN KING was born in Portland, Maine, in 1947. He made his first professional short-story sale in 1967 to Startling Mystery Stories. He has gone on to publish more than fifty books, and many of his novels and shorter tales have been adapted for the movies and television, including Carrie, The Shining, Misery, The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile and The Mist. Among many awards and honours, Stephen King is the recipient of the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and in 2007 was inducted as a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America. His most recent work includes the novels 11.22.63 and Under the Dome, and two short-story collections, Full Dark, No Stars and Just After Sunset. He lives in Maine and Florida with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.

  CLIVE BARKER was born in Liverpool, England, where he began his creative career writing, directing and acting for the stage. Since then, he has gone on to pen such bestsellers as The Books of Blood, Weaveworld, Imajica, The Great and Secret Show, The Thief of Always, Everville, Sacrament, Galilee, Coldheart Canyon, Mr B. Gone and the highly acclaimed fantasy series, Abarat. As a screenwriter, director and film producer, he is credited with the Hellraiser and Candyman pictures, as well as Nightbreed, Lord of Illusions, Gods and Monsters, The Midnight Meat Train, Clive Barker’s Book of Blood and Dread. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

  ROBERT BLOCH (1917–94) wrote fiction in the genres of crime, horror and science fiction, as well as being a prolific screenwriter. Born in Chicago, he became involved in the writers’ group the Milwaukee Fictioneers in
the 1930s. It was group member Gustav Marx who gave Bloch a job writing copy in his advertising firm, which also allowed him freedom to write stories in the office in his spare time. Heavily influenced by Lovecraft in his early career, Bloch also gravitated towards the darker side of human existence. His first novel, for example – a thriller called The Scarf (1947) – revolved around a writer who used real women as his characters, before murdering them with the titular scarf. Bloch was also very interested in the Jack the Ripper mythology, which most famously informed the script for his Star Trek episode “Wolf in the Fold”, as well as his 1984 novel Night of the Ripper. But it is for the character of Norman Bates from his 1959 novel Psycho that Bloch is probably best remembered. Immortalized by Anthony Perkins in the 1960 Hitchcock movie, Bates went on to feature in a further three sequels – and was then played by Vince Vaughn in the 1998 Gus Van Sant remake. In 1991, three years prior to his death from cancer, Bloch was given the honour of being Master of Ceremonies at the very first World Horror Convention, in Nashville, Tennessee. His is a legacy that will endure for ever.

  The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes RAMSEY CAMPBELL as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer”. He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers’ Association and the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild. Among his novels are The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, Midnight Sun, The Count of Eleven, Silent Children, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight, Secret Story, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain and Ghosts Know. Forthcoming is The Kind Folk. His collections include Waking Nightmares, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead and Just Behind You, and his non-fiction is collected as Ramsey Campbell, Probably. His novels The Nameless and Pact of the Fathers have been filmed in Spain. His regular columns appear in Prism, All Hallows, Dead Reckonings and Video Watchdog. He is the President of the British Fantasy Society and of the Society of Fantastic Films. Ramsey Campbell lives on Merseyside with his wife Jenny. His pleasures include classical music, good food and wine, and whatever’s in that pipe. His website is at www.ramseycampbell.com