Anxieties around stable and unified human subjectivity, and the related emergence of a transformative or transformed abhuman, are central to gothic criticism. However, this approach takes the European male, universalised through Enlightenment humanism, as its normative subject, with (some) women, colonised others, and non-human nature as, therefore, abhuman and the epitome of the abject. This fcritiques the primitivist underpinnings of European constructions of the human, abject and the abhuman, and exposes plural modes of being evident in a world-gothic analysis of The Icarus Girl (Oyeyemi) and Freshwater (Emezi).

Is all horror “body horror”? Can we think of the horror genre without thinking about the body’s messy and intimate materiality? This chapter looks at some of the queasier manifestations of horror culture, a mode that foregrounds questions of the body’s (and the reader’s or viewer’s) limits. Despite body horror’s association with recent cinema, this chapter argues for a longer and more diverse lineage for the term, an attention to embodied experience and its grotesque transformations that can be found in US fiction from Charles Brockden Brown’s spontaneous combustions in Wieland (1798) through to the zombie apocalypse novels of the twenty-first century. The emphasis is placed on five main types of body horror and their differences: hybrid corporeality, parasitism, abjection and disgust, the grotesque, and, finally, body horror built around gore and the explicit rendering of violence.