A Darker Shade of Noir
Edited by Joyce Carol Oates
Akashic Books
A Darker Shade of Noir contains fifteen new stories by female writers exploring various creepy and macabre themes of the body horror genre. Edited by the acclaimed and prolific Joyce Carol Oates, who contributes one story, along with Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale) and thirteen other accomplished contemporary writers.
The stories take a current look at a very old sub-genre of the horror story and updates it to the present time of Covid-19, a real horror attacking bodies and killing millions worldwide.
Joyce Carol Oates assembles her team of writers and two visual artists (Laurel Hausler and Lisa Lim) to create a body of work (excuse the pun) that explores many facets of body horror. Two works take place in earlier time settings. One explores horror through the lens of race. Two pieces have male victims (monkeypox and smallpox). And Lisa Lim’s “Dancing with Mirrors” is illustrated with her drawings delving into the body issues of her mother. They ask questions such as who owns my body? Why do women conform to mens’ idea of beauty?
The body horror sub-genre has an ancestry going back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). The term was coined in 1983 to describe a trend seen in movies. For literary works, body horror centers around the grotesque and psychologically disturbing violation of the human body. That includes aberrant sex, viruses, mutilation, and mutation. All topics covered in this book.
Joyce Carol Oates has edited other previous anthologies such as New Jersey Noir, Prison Noir and Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers. She has a knack for gathering the best writers and producing excellent collections of stories. These stories are fun to read. Some are funny; some are weird. It’s an entertaining mix.
The anthology is divided into three groups: You’ve Created a Monster, Morbid Anatomy, and Out of Body, Out of Time. However, common motifs run throughout the stories regardless of the category. Desire, vanity, anxiety, possession, and even dancing link the pieces into a cohesive examination of the female psyche. We see how women relate to their own bodies and how their bodies relate to men. The women are possessed or out of control, One character succinctly sums it up as “there is something wrong with my body.”
Yes, something is wrong. But don’t think too hard. You wouldn’t want everyone to think you’re crazy, as another character states. Whether the source of this horror is internal (psychological) or external (spider bites, guns), these stories are bound to keep you turning pages and make you think about your own relationship to your body.
