Body Horror and the Myth of the Perfect Victim
Hollow Tongue by Eden Royce (2024)
This post has spoilers! Trigger/content warnings include domestic violence, gun violence, physical disability, and body horror.
I haven’t felt this viscerally disturbed by a book in a minute. The slow build of this novella makes the ultimate reveal and final action absolutely worth the wait. I actually gasped when I found out the main twist at the end, and I’m going to keep chasing the feelings this story elicited in me in my own writing and other things I read.
Story Summary.
Hollow Tongue follows Maxine — who goes by Max — as she returns to her childhood home to find out what happened to her parents. After she receives a letter from a bank in her hometown demanding payment on the safe deposit box she shared with her mother, Max realizes that her mom must have finally left her father. But she hasn’t actually heard from either of her parents, so where did they go?
She doesn’t take much with her from her apartment in Washington, D.C.: one suitcase, the bank letter, and a persistent leg injury sustained after she was shot by a stranger in a bodega.
When Max gets home, nobody’s there. The house is empty and stuffy, the yard overgrown. Over the course of the story, we get her present confusion and concern interwoven with several key childhood experiences in that home. Many of these revolve around her father’s negligence (like the time he leaves Max alone overnight as a young girl after her mother has surgery) and verbal violence. Moreover, her memories and musings during her days in the home as an adult focus on her mother’s responses — or lack thereof — to her father’s behavior and inability to escape or even use her considerable artistic talents for anything except work.
Max spends time trying to tame the garden and unravel the mystery of her parents’ disappearances. But she isn’t in the house long before she uncovers her mother’s new identity and life she’s made for herself in her father’s absence: Genevieve, professionally going by her initials, is doing well, more or less. She is free. When Max does finally speak with her mother, she gets some of her questions answered, but we have to wait until the final pages of the novella to find out exactly what happened to her father.
I won’t give away the ending because I desperately want you to experience the shock and disgust and fear I felt for yourself. But I will say that the physicality and body horror of this story are excellent, from Royce’s descriptions of Max’s physical sensations to the haunting imagery of the big reveal that I’ve thought about every day since reading it.
Body Horror — A Freeing History
Body horror as a concept has been around in film and television since the 1950s. Classic examples include The Blob and The Fly, both released in 1958. There’s also the absolutely phenomenal Season 2, Episode 6 of The Twilight Zone (the original series): “Eye of the Beholder.”
Body horror can be extremely freeing, especially people in marginalized bodies (trans people, people of the global majority, disabled people, women, trauma survivors…the list goes on). Exploring the potential for both beauty and horror through fiction lets people with complicated relationships to their bodies dissect their feelings and fears in a safe way.
I’d argue that body horror has been around in literature at least since Mary Shelley’s seminal 1818 text, Frankenstein. Shelley’s mother, celebrated feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, died shortly after she was born from complications that arose during childbirth. (1) Shelley also suffered multiple miscarriages and outlived three children. All these traumatic experiences contributed to her feelings of guilt and alienation from her own body. (2)
Beyond Revulsion in Body Horror
Royce’s Hollow Tongue joins a long history of body horror that explores more than just gross, physical things that can happen to humans. There are questions of what family owes each other, the different forms abuse and neglect can take, and the ethics of what women do to survive.
Hollow Tongue’s main plot sees Max trying to figure out what’s happened to her parents in her absence. But under this primary mystery is a nuanced, emotional interrogation of why women don’t — can’t — “just leave” a marriage. Especially when there are children involved. Regular people who’ve never been in emotionally, mentally, financially, and/or physically abusive relationships are always on the hunt for the “perfect victim.” And they’re quick to tear a survivor apart if they don’t meet their impossible expectations: if they didn’t leave after the first sign of violence, if they had children with their abuser, if they don’t leave after the 10th or 20th sign of violence. But the “perfect victim” doesn’t exist, and never will: it’s a myth cooked up by the patriarchy and white supremacy to keep marginalized groups easier to oppress. And that’s because the perfect victim myth is embedded into the systems survivors of violence rely on, whether it’s elder abuse, child abuse, or spousal abuse: therapy, social services, and the criminal-legal system. Homes are assessed for child safety and restraining orders granted or denied by people in authority — who have traditionally been white and/or men — with their own biases or crimes against vulnerable people.
Max and Genevieve’s story is a compassionate, complex portrait of the desperation many people feel in real life. That’s what I appreciated most about this novella: the authenticity of emotion. I love the slow build, the trippy dream-like elements, the physicality. The horror hit me but the interpersonal history and Max’s memories of her father really affected me, because they reminded me so much of my own childhood. The walking on eggshells, the uncertainty around adults in the house, and several other things read as real to me. And I think that’s one of the great powers of horror: you can talk about a man slowly being turned into a giant, bloodthirsty, human-insect hybrid (which isn’t actually possible…as far as I know) while at the same time, making readers feel validated and seen in their own experiences. And I think Black horror does this especially well.
More to Think About.
Below are some questions to ask yourself and prompts for further research. Don’t forget to subscribe to the blog and the newsletter here on Medium — I’m sending out “extras” on the Tuesdays between posts with things that didn’t fit into the main entry.
And email me at blackhorrific@gmail.com and follow me on Tiktok (@domi_aaaaaa) if you want to talk more!
- What are your favorite horror stories that talk about bigger, more human problems or experiences?
- Do you enjoy writing, watching, and/or reading body horror? Why or why not?
Thanks for reading!
Sources.
(1) Ashby, Campbell (2019) “Personal Problems = Great Literature: Shelley’s Motherhood Issues Reflected In Frankenstein,” Celebrating Writers and Writing in our Communities: Vol. 2 : Iss. 1 , Article 22. Available at: https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/rwc/vol2/iss1/22.
(2) Ashby, Campbell (2019) “Personal Problems = Great Literature: Shelley’s Motherhood Issues Reflected In Frankenstein,” Celebrating Writers and Writing in our Communities: Vol. 2 : Iss. 1 , Article 22. Available at: https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/rwc/vol2/iss1/22.
