The sixth and final chapter considers horror writing’s appropriation of flesh-caricature from writing descriptive of the human body, dismantling character’s place in formal realism. I explore the grotesquing of the disproportioned body in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and her short story ’Transformation’, and in Walter Scott’s dwarf characters, where the aesthetic type of the ’gigantic dwarf’ gives rise to a mode of writing I call ’horrid realism’. The second part of the chapter grounds horrid realism in eighteenth-century texts that imagine the literalisation of caricatúra, such as Thomas Browne’s depiction of the Hippocratic face, and the effects of swaddling bands and foundation garments as pictured by John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Buchan, William Cadogan, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin and J. P. Malcolm.