If horror at large is a “body genre”—so-called, by film scholar Linda Williams, because of the emphasis on the physical affect of its tropes—then “body horror” might be an unnecessary repetition of terms. On the other hand, it might be the genre’s purest expression, a subgenre that fully encapsulates its generic container, writing the ferocious excess that is incumbent in horror texts directly onto and into the human body, literally em-bodying the messiness of dissolving form—and pushing and transcending nature itself in a maximalist burst of blood and transgression.
No one, to my mind, embodies this maximalism in their work more than Joe Koch, whose second collection Invaginies is out now from Clash Books. His stories, surreal and distressing, strike the reader like a Roberto Matta painting, all sickening tones and bodily irruption. It’s both nightmarish and transcendent, finding the numinous in the mess and rupture and friction of bodies and in the inherent dualism of body horror: its gore-filled splattery side and the transcendent, ecstatic thrill of physical transformation.
Reactions to Koch’s work tend to dwell in the lurid transgression and horrific smut that populate it, and while those are certainly there (my god, are they there—this is a difficult read for those of us averse to representations of sexual violence [1]), that’s not what I’d like to focus on. It isn’t what I read for. What I find captivating about Koch’s writing is, well, the writing. His prose feels simultaneously seethingly chaotic and incredibly precise in word choice and rhythm and metaphor. His are stories that emphasize and illustrate the fact that body horror is to the body as the surreal is to the real, gnosticism to cosmicism: it undoes and remakes it, contradicts and hybridizes and splatters it.
What to make of all this? I’d like to argue that, in Invaginies, Koch densely layers the conceptual maximalism of body horror with similarly uncompromising poetics to achieve a fully maximalist horror. What might it mean for horror to be maximalist? Well, the literary theorist Stefano Ercolino has pointed to ten chief characteristics of maximalism as a literary movement: length, encyclopedic mode, dissonant chorality, diagetic exuberance, completeness, narratorial omniscience, paranoid imagination, intersemioticity, ethical commitment, and hybrid realism. These tendencies, culled from an investigation into the maximalist novel, require some adjusting (mutating?) if we are to use them when discussing short genre fiction, but what could be more appropriate than slicing and suturing these concepts to fit Koch’s body horror?
Length, of course, can be severed and discarded, reconstituted from length-of-the-form into the expansiveness-of-information that Koch packs within a shorter form—vertical density rather than horizontal expansiveness. In this way, the encyclopedic mode, a multiplicity of information and influence, thrives within Koch’s work, as does diagetic exuberance, wherein a story’s “narrative is hypertrophic; its stories and characters are innumerable.” In Koch’s stories, characters and forms shift and transform, narratives dissolve and blur away into surreality, voices blend and change. Reality itself hypertrophies.
Similarly, hybrid realism is exactly what it sounds like, reality “inextricably fused” with the “implausible, grotesque, or even ridiculous,” which Koch does with gusto. There are, though, elements of Ercolino’s framework to which Koch’s work doesn’t so much fail to conform as explode out of and exceed. They come to seem like bounds of realism that are superseded by his surreality and disinterest in what squares would call coherence. Completeness (a rigid structural logic to the narrative) and narratorial omniscience, for example, are barely relevant to Invaginies. Meanwhile, paranoid imagination, for Ercolino, is also a strictly mimetic affair—in this case of conspiracy theories. But he notably says that it could be considered either “a postmodern declination of the sublime, an ‘antidote’ to the radical skepticism of certain theoretical practices of deconstruction” or a “profound desire to re-enchant the world”; either way, it is the conviction of the paranoid that “everything is linked” which drives the maximalist work. For Koch—surreal, horror-fixated, perverse, and gory—these totalising linkages transcend the rational and therefore (body horror alert!) the division between internal and external. indeed, this interconnection rises to the level of bleedthrough between his stories—not in the sense of a shared built-world or literal interconnectedness, but in the feeling that any of his stories could transform into any of the others at any moment.
A deeper sense of paranoia is found in the collection’s consistent imbrication with a Gnostic anticosmicism: the world, and our ontologies, are to be transcended, approached unnaturally. In Koch’s “Leviathan’s Knot,” a devil-figure, imprisoned within the protagonist’s flesh, “reaches naked inside me, his seven tongues tickling the five points of the pentagram at my extremities plus two more in my fiery eyes. The pattern of points traces the dimensions of a tree. Gnostic fruit flowers with truth.” As without, so within, we might say, or point to the Jesus of the Gnostic, anti-canonical Gospel of Thomas, who said that “Whoever has come to know the world has discovered a carcass, and whoever has discovered a carcass, of that person the world is not worthy.” This is body horror’s breakdown of interior vs exterior writ ontologically. This kind of mythopoetic, Old Testament language and fervor infuses many of these stories, carrying through the repression of modern American Christianity and its paranoid sense that the world is not what it seems—in other words, that one has discovered, in the world, a carcass. In Koch, characters are as likely to react that discovery with eros as with disgust.
Take, for example, the collection’s closing novelette, “The Wing of Circumcision Hands,” which also offers us opportunity to reflect on another of Ercolino’s elements of maximalism, intersemioticity. The novelette revolves around a subterranean cathedral that’s somehow also a massive worm and a salt mine, which houses an archive of deleted footage from transgressive films. The structure stands in for the carcass of the world, the museum’s docent likened to an angel as she surreally, bloodily unmakes herself and becomes one with the ceiling of the nave, and the Biblical descriptions of setting and process provide some of Koch’s best writing in this volume. The story profanely culminates in a horrific, bloody orgy that will strike some readers as thrillingly transgressive and others as a descent into the parodic excesses of erotic horror. Koch’s surreality and multiplicities are often rooted in the—here we go!—intersemioticity at play in this film archive. It draws upon different forms of media in a way that Ercolino explains as “the contemporary imaginary [being] polymorphic, tending towards exhausting and traversing multiple expressive experiences, crossing borders and abolishing aesthetic taboos.”
Ercolino goes so far, indeed, as to say that intersemioticity is a movement toward an “impure” form of fiction. One hardly needs to unpack that to apply it to Koch’s prurient body horror. “Bride of the White Rat,” for instance, folds a disembodied narrator discussing the mistreatment of rats in the 1979 remake of Nosferatu into the story of a couple, one neo-Nazi and one not, who are mistreating (and being vengefully mistreated by) rats in the present day. Elsewhere, “Eclipse, Embrace” is a modulation of “Little Red Riding Hood” by way of Kate Bush (which I only know, I have to admit, because of its original publication in an anthology dedicated to her). Other stories are less literally or obviously inter-semiotic, but fold in so many approaches and voices that they achieve the status in a more avowedly surreal way.
Most apt of all of Ercolino’s characteristics when discussing Koch, however, are dissonant chorality and ethical commitment. The former describes a text with such a “multiplicity of voices” that none are dominant—that is, a work in which “[t]he languages, the registers, the styles, the genres, the knowledge and voices [create] an extraordinary openness and dialogic richness.” This effect is, one might say, an embodiment of the hybridity of body horror as a formal or narrative structure. By ethical commitment, Ercolino means a work’s investment in “themes of great historical, political, and social relevance” (for Koch, these are often issues of sexuality and transness, economic precarity and repression). Ercolino notes that this seriousness is a recurrence of modernist interferences within the postmodern (the latter given over to frivolity rather than seriousness), making maximalism an “aesthetically hybrid genre.”
The emphasis in that list is Ercolino’s, but I would have added it if it wasn’t there. That’s because hybridity is an important concept for our purposes, tangling as it does body horror with certain theories of the monstrous, many of which situate the liminal hybridity and messiness of the “natural order” as central to both the definition of the monster and to the generic limits of horror. The monster theorist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has called monsters “disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration,” such that “the monster resists any classification built on any hierarchy or a merely binary opposition, demanding instead a ‘system’ allowing polyphony, mixed response (difference in sameness, repulsion in attraction), and resistance to integration.” [2]
Now, the emphasis in that quotation is, this time, mine. But how striking that polyphony plays a part in both maximalism and monstrosity—and, I would argue, in Koch’s brand of body horror. Koch is a herald of the outcast and the grotesque, the freaks and the weirdos, who often form a coherent mass in his stories. Let’s keep the scholars coming. Julia Kristeva uses the term “abjection” to describe the disgust that is felt, socially or culturally, for that which is cast out, or considered impure and unclean, or removed from the “clean” or “natural” body (physical body or body politic). In this way, Koch can be seen to combine dissonant chorality and ethical commitment in a sort of collectivity of the abject.
This is nowhere clearer than the excellent “Beloved of Flies,” which begins with the straightforward declaration that “[t]hey cut him in half and filled him with flies,” leaving him with the sense that “[c]olonized, he felt strangely safe. No longer one, he was many.” The sickening roiling within him whirs throughout the story, physically unpleasant but emotionally reassuring him that he’s no longer alone but now a collectivity, a sentient hybridity of death and life—animate and inanimate, a “restless chorus,” a physicalized abject excess of dissonant chorality. Even more abject, more repulsive, more body-horrific, the end of “Convulsive, or Not At All” features a crowd simultaneously mass-beheaded and yet necromantically acting as one, individualities and bodies broken and remade into the abject collective. (I’d be remiss not to note here that the first of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s seven theses on monstrosity instructs the reader to “[b]ehead the corpse, so that, acephalic, it will not know itself as subject, only as pure body.”)
These stories partake of dissonant chorality within themselves, then, but it’s striking across the collection at large, too. (Again, that feeling that the stories bleed into and through one another.) Koch’s language similarly moves through multiple voices, a spectrum between staccato hammering and a flowery, more languid unfolding. He’s particularly fond of consonance, a key part of that hammering rhythm of some of his sentences: “My forehead’s fiery on the pale blue bedsheets,” or, “Bruised wounds align with the brushstrokes of the burglar bars.” Of course, sometimes the consonant and the ornate collide, earthy bodily consonance sitting next to the ethereal, the incomprehensible numinous: “He sucks down his full draught of hopeless dross, of deceptions and decapitations, of debating the desires of small kings.” I noted these sentences because of the consonance; that they all emphasize the body and its actions is a happy (and telling) accident.
Koch’s language bleeds between metaphor and narrative, allowing things to be simultaneously real and not-real. In “I Married A Dead Man,” a blistering assault on the patriarchal family, a deadbeat dad’s hand is described on one page, metaphorically, as the “fungoid-like tendrils of my father’s pale white fingers”; but on the next page his other hand is taken literally, “still human and not some sort of parasitic growth.” “Coneland” modulates this way at least twice, opening with a second-person you peering into an ice cream store, the window “hard to see through, but you can’t resist shuttering your eyes like using a View-Master to peer inside and look at your past,” before establishing that that is exactly what you’re doing, the View-Master a literal object and locus within the story. Later, moving through the various historical periods of the ice cream shop and its uncanny mascots, “[y]ou click to progress to the next slide. The crack of the lever is as loud as a rifle blast. A body bursts apart into pieces a few feet away from you. The pieces shower down. You click the lever again and fire another round into the crowd.” In “The Wing of Circumcision Hands,” the paired protagonists, art thief and art patron, see their relationship and narrative ekphrastically mutate in reference to the deleted scenes they’re excavating.
Koch is a descendent of the surrealists, and for him description itself escapes the bounds of the knowable. Recall that Ercolino linked the maximalist paranoid imagination to a “profound desire to re-enchant the world”; many of Koch’s characters are searching for meaning anticosmically, internally or externally; seeking to escape this capitalist rationality, this Gnostic prison of reality. For the co-founder of surrealism André Breton, beauty was something that must disturb audiences with psychological upheaval or be nothing at all, and Koch’s characters are often looking for that quality in the abject and monstrous. In “Convulsive, or Not At All,” for example—its title itself taken from Breton’s Nadja (1928)—an embodied void is born in an orgasmic convulsion of “the antagonism of negating existence through extreme biology; the love that drives them towards beauty, always beauty, for beauty must be.” For Koch, the search for beauty goes hand-in-objectionable-hand with abjection.
In this sense, Invaginies is not a book to be understood, or perhaps even to be enjoyed. In “Chironoplasty”—even more of a cri de coeur than the other stories here—another mass of bodies acts as one. In it, Chiron—“[h]alf-centaur, half man, half something-or-other; too many halves to make a simple whole and all the confusion of a fable told and retold”—gets gender-affirming surgery in a wonderfully weird “metastasized city” full of negation and anti-alien protestors from the “Institute of Genetic Purity.” The latter miserable mob eventually form another of Koch’s abjected, body-horror-ized collectivities, amassed “like the multiplying bacteria of an infection,” piling up their individual bodies to be unmade. “Bones snap. Teeth smash. Lips bleed. None can breathe by the time the dominant bodies squeeze up to the ceiling’s rafters.” The remade reactionaries then bear witness to Chiron’s triumphant transition. Like most of Koch’s conclusions, this is not the annihilatory ending of so many horror stories, but an unfolding, an awakening into the numinous.
These are stories that exhibit horror in imagery and affect, but not narrative. Koch centers the body-in-horror and hybridizes genre, maximalism, and prose, reality and surreality, the abject and the numinous. Georges Bataille once wrote of “divine ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror.” Koch’s stories, in their excess of abjection and monstrosity, are to be grappled with, worn down by, suffered through. He drags duality through the filth of body horror, maximal to the end.
Endnotes
[1] If horror is one of Linda Williams’s “body genres,” another is, naturally, pornography. She notes that “pornography is today more often deemed excessive for its violence than for its sex, while horror films are excessive in their displacement of sex onto violence.” (Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess” in Film Quarterly Vol. 44, No. 4 (Summer, 1991), pp. 2-13.) [return]
[2] Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (ed.), Monster Theory: Reading Culture (1996). [return]