Nearly forty years after the term was coined, “body horror” is still going strong, with several major anthologies on this theme published recently and a horde of new authors building on the foundations laid by the likes of Clive Barker and Kathe Koja. It may not be as easy to shock an audience as it was in the eighties, but transgression will always be possible as long as people try to set moral and social standards. No matter how body-positive society gets, the forced ownership of a human body will always have something horrifying about it, and the best body horror is not just physical but social and sometimes even metaphysical. That is certainly the case with George Daniel Lea, a direct descendant of Clive Barker in style and content. Volume 1 of the Born in Blood series introduced the reader to Abarise, a realm where trauma is a universal state and suffering is the only reliable key to transcendence. He has also developed a complex multiverse governed by entities with opposing agendas, where change is the only constant and attempts to impose order inevitably end in bloody entropy, with entire civilizations collapsing into an amorphous mess like Helen Vaughan at the end of The Great God Pan. Volume 2 continues to develop these themes, and also sheds light on the more uplifting side of what seems at first glance to be a very nihilistic cosmogony. As shown in “A Feast For The Eyes” (which sees the son of a serial killer retrace his father’s footsteps to find the roots of his obsession), salvation of a sort can be found through art – albeit the kind that often involves some guy sticking a corkscrew down his urethra or writing on the walls with pancreatic fluid - and those who are able to embrace constant change win the prize of being able to “dream [themselves] other”. There are those for whom a life of grotesque physical transformation is preferable to being trapped in a single fixed state of being, and much like Whitney Houston, Lea believes that children are our future. In “Little Mad Gods” a little girl discovers a new lease of life when her world begins to disintegrate in a rain of blood and madness that has its share of beauty, a place where the “lips of cuts” can “[take] flight from the entities that suffered them” and become butterflies. “No Finer Heaven” features a pair of chronically disappointed teenagers who find their way into another world, an unnerving red heaven beyond the reach of the unimaginative greyfolk who superintend their waking reality. Long live the new flesh, indeed, though I couldn’t help but feel sorry for some of the parent characters. The style isn’t for everyone. It can fairly be described as “balls to the wall”, which I suppose is appropriate considering the things that happen to genitalia in this kind of book. Many passages are more like mantras, with certain words and concepts – filth, shit, parasites etc. - repeated again and again until all meaning is bludgeoned out of them, leaving the reader flailing in a death-metal quagmire of gore and bodily secretions. George Orwell once wrote that “Good prose should be transparent, like a windowpane”. If Orwell’s prose is a windowpane, then Lea is a disaffected youth hurling a rock through it and running away shouting “Piss off, grandad!” over his shoulder. That’s not to say he’s a bad writer, however. Lea is quite capable of conventional storytelling when he wants to. He is, after all, a disciple of Clive Barker, and Barker is a writer with more than one face. Though the predominant influences in Lea’s work are mid-period Clive - those sprawling doorstop fantasy novels like Weaveworld and The Great and Secret Show – my favourite stories in this collection are more reminiscent of Barker’s earlier writing. The gore, romance and existential ennui of The Hellbound Heart find plenty of echoes here, with Lea’s character Kempton pleasantly redolent of Barker’s legendary GDM, “Uncle” Frank Cotton. The novella “An Idiot’s Hope” also reminds me a lot of the urban paranoia and more controlled, gritty but lyrical style of The Damnation Game or tales like ‘The Age of Desire’. This is a good thing in my book, because the Mad John Martin hugeness of Barker’s later writing leads to a certain stasis - sometimes writing about Everything can look a lot like writing about nothing, and that’s a problem Lea suffers from too on occasion. But “An Idiot’s Hope” is dynamic and also offers human focus, with solid characterization in the form of the horrid DI Roseblade and a married couple who fall foul of interdimensional horrors (I particularly liked the realistic description of the wife Jessica’s alienation from her friends and family following what everybody assumes is a bout of psychotic mental illness.) The final stories, “The Last Gospel”, and “Epilogue”, will also provide some answers for anyone frustrated by the absence of certain details in Lea’s mythos. Overall this is a collection that demands commitment from the reader, but that commitment is rewarded, especially in the longer stories, and this book should also appeal to those who enjoy a queer or trans sensibility in their body horror. Lea’s characters often refuse to sit quietly in the physical and social box life has built for them, and discover that this is not only okay, but a precondition of survival. In a culture that’s often a bit too fond of the old sorting-hat, this polymorphism is a great strength.  Born in Blood, Volume 2 by George Daniel Lea Publisher : Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing (10 Aug. 2021) Language : English Paperback : 364 pages ISBN-10 : 1943720568 ISBN-13 : 978-1943720569 The second volume of George Daniel Lea's Born in Blood, a collection of beautiful horror stories guaranteed to burn a hole in your heart. SOMEWHERE BETWEEN HIGH HEAVEN AND LOW HELL Born in blood . . . the first breath and all that follow, tainted by original trauma, echoing throughout every thought, every heartbeat; blossoming into more profound pain, until breath and thought both cease . . . What we grow accustomed to . . . what we can endure: The days bleed into one another, as we do; hurt defining every moment. No more. Now, all instants are one; pulsing brilliant, ecstasy and agony, rendered down; experienced in a heartbeat. Every shame. Every sorrow. Humanity, history. This is what we are; the God we gave birth to. Better? Yes. Yes. Now, we all suffer the same; no more division; no privilege or powerlessness. We are the same; sexless, skinless, ex sanguine. And we celebrate, content in our disgrace. A Book Review by Daisy Lyle TODAY ON THE GINGER NUTS OF HORROR WEBSITE VILE AFFECTIONS BY CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN [BOOK REVIEW]THE SHADOW PEOPLE BY GRAHAM MASTERTON [BOOK REVIEW] THE HEART AND SOUL OF HORROR FICTION REVIEWS Comments are closed.
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