"Horror, in essence, is about porousness. Our terrors take varied forms but horror probes their single, existential source: the terrifying permeability of our boundaries. If spirits can swim back from the world of the dead, if the living body can degrade to the point where it becomes malleable or parasitically possessed, what hope can there be for our fantasy of security and selfhood?"
"A woman has tied rocks to her waist and attempted to drown herself. Touching the bottom, she inhales, drawing in with the lungful of water a new lucidity. Steered from her suicidal course, she surfaces and returns to a family life not so much altered as clarified in its inadequacy. Only her mysterious neighbour seems to understand. Recognising in her a morbidness with which he too is familiar, he teaches her to cope by mastering death hunting and skinning animals."
Stories frame horror as the collapse of boundaries between self and other, body and environment, and order and chaos. Recurring imagery—ocean, madness, and floods—maps the exterior breaching the interior. One narrative follows a woman who survives a suicide attempt, gains a strange lucidity, and returns to an inadequate family life while a neighbour introduces her to rituals of death and skinning. The visceral learning suggests knowledge inside exposed flesh and prompts intrusive desires that unsettle identity. Direct, clear language charts emotional terrain where ordinary life becomes terrifying through permeability and contagion.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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