Body Shocks : Extreme Tales of Body Horror

2022 Splatterpunk Award Winner

[STARRED REVIEW] “Hugo Award–winning editor Datlow (Edited By) brings together 29 spine-tingling tales of body horror to terrify even the most seasoned horror reader."
—Publishers Weekly

Bestselling editor Ellen Datlow (Lovecraft’s Monsters) presents body horror at its most wide-ranging and shocking best. Discover twenty-nine intricate, twisted tales of the human body, soul, and psyche, as told by storytelling legends including Carmen Maria Machado, Richard Kadrey, Seanan McGuire, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Nathan Ballingrud, Tananarive Due, Cassandra Khaw, Christopher Fowler, and many more.

The most terrifying thing that you can possibly imagine is your own body in the hands of a monster. Or worse, in the hands of another human being. In this definitive anthology of body horror selected by a World Horror Grandmaster, you’ll find the unthinkable and the shocking: a couture designer preparing for an exquisitely grotesque runway show; a vengeful son seeking the parent who bred him as plasma donor; a celebrity-kink brothel that inflicts plastic surgery on sex workers; and organ-harvesting doctors who dissect a living man without anesthetic.

A groundbreaking new horror anthology, curated by the genre’s leading editor and featuring a stellar contributors list, focuses on one of the most basic—yet most terrifying—things: The human body.

World Horror, Bram Stoker, and Shirley Jackson Award-winning editor Ellen Datlow is widely considered the foremost horror editor of her generation; Datlow’s lifetime sales are over 500,000 copies.

Anthology contributors include some of horror and dark fantasy’s most prestigious authors: Carmen Maria Machado, Richard Kadrey, Seanan McGuire, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Alyssa Wong, Tananarive Due, Cassandra Khaw, Christopher Fowler, and more.

Datlow has edited six previous anthologies for Tachyon, including the bestsellers Lovecraft’s Monsters and Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror.

Cover and interior spot illustrations by World Fantasy Award-winning artist John Coulthart (Lovecraft's Monsters)

National marketing plan to include author and publisher social media campaigns, print and digital ARCs, book launch, author events and appearances, blog tour, podcasts, features, and interviews

Ellen Datlow is one of horror’s quintessential, bestselling, and most acclaimed editors. She has won multiple Hugo, Bram Stoker, Locus, and Shirley Jackson awards and has received lifetime achievement awards from several organizations including the World Fantasy and World Horror Associations.She was the fiction editor of OMNI for nearly twenty years, and edited the magazines Event Horizon and Sci Fiction, and is currently a genre fiction editor at Tor.com. Her many anthologies include the long-running Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, the Best Horror of the Year series; Snow White, Blood Red; Lovecraft’s Monsters; Naked City; The Monstrous; and Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror. Datlow lives in New York City.

Nathan Ballingrud is the author of North American Lake Monsters, The Visible Filth, and the forthcoming The Atlas of Hell . Several of his stories are in development for film and TV. He has twice won the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives somewhere in the mountains of North Carolina.

Simon Bestwick is the author of six novels, the novellas Breakwater and Angels of the Silences, four full-length short story collections, and two miniature ones. His short fiction has appeared in Black Static, The Devil and the Deep, and The London Reader and has been reprinted in The Best Horror of the Year and Best British Fantasy 2013. Four times shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award, he is married to fellow author Cate Gardner. His latest book is the collection And Cannot Come Again, recently reissued by Horrific Tales. He’s usually to be found watching films, reading or writing, which keeps him out of mischief. Most of the time. Bestwick lives on the Wirral while pining for Wales.

Michael Blumlein, M.D. was an American fiction writer and a physician. Most of his writing is in or near the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. His novels include The Healer, The Movement of Mountains and X, Y. He was been nominated for the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award. His final work was the novella, Longer, which came out in 2019, a few months before he died of cancer.

Edward Bryant began writing professionally in 1968 and had more than a dozen books published, including Among the Dead, Cinnabar, Phoenix Without Ashes (with Harlan Ellison), Wyoming Sun, Particle Theory, Fetish (a novella chapbook), and The Baku: Tales of the Nuclear Age. In the beginning he was known as a science fiction writer but gradually strayed into horror and mostly remained there until his death in 2017, writing a series of sharply etched stories about Angie Black, a contemporary witch, the brilliant zombie story “A Sad Last Love at the Diner of the Damned,” and other marvelous, exceedingly dark tales.

Ray Cluley is a British Fantasy Award winner with stories published in various magazines and anthologies. Some of these have been reprinted in Best of the Year volumes, Nightmares: A New Decade of Modern Horror, as well as Steve Berman’s Wilde Stories: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction, and Benoît Domis’s Ténèbres. He has been translated into French, Polish, Hungarian, and Chinese. His short fiction is collected in Probably Monsters while a second collection will soon be looking for a home. He is currently writing for Black Library’s horror imprint, as well as working on his own novel. You can find out more at www.probablymonsters.wordpress.com.

Pat Cadigan has won the Locus Award three times, the Arthur C. Clarke Award twice, the Hugo Award, and the Seiun Award. She has written twenty-one books, including one YA, two nonfiction, and several movie novelizations/media tie-ins. In December, 2014, she was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given two years to live, but she missed that deadline. Cadigan believes it’s because she was put here to accomplish a certain number of things and she is now so far behind, she can never die.

Terry Dowling is one of Australia’s most respected and internationally acclaimed writers of science fiction, dark fantasy, and horror, and author of the multi-award-winning Tom Rynosseros saga. The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series featured more horror stories by Dowling in its 21-year run than by any other writer. Dowling’s horror is collected in the International Horror Guild Award-winning Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear, the Aurealis Award-winning An Intimate Knowledge of the Night, and The Night Shop: Tales for the Lonely Hours. Other publications include his novel, Clowns at Midnight and The Complete Rynosseros. “Toother” won the Australian Shadows Award. His homepage can be found at www.terrydowling.com.

Tananarive Due teaches Afrofuturism and Black Horror at UCLA. The American Book Award winner, British Fantasy Award winner and NAACP Image Award recipient is the author of several novels and a short story collection, Ghost Summer: Stories. She is also co-author of a civil rights memoir, Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights (with her late mother, Patricia Stephens Due). In 2013 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. She and her husband, science fiction author Steven Barnes, co-wrote an episode of The Twilight Zone for CBS All Access and Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions.

Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen works of fiction, most recently the collection Song for the Unraveling of the World, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times’s Ray Bradbury Prize. Other recent books include the collection A Collapse of Horses and the novella The Warren, which was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award. His novel Last Days won the 2010 ALA-RUSA Award for Best Horror Novel. His novel The Open Curtain was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. Other books include The Wavering Knife (which won the IHG Award for best story collection) and Altmann’s Tongue. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes, an NEA fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Critical Studies Program at CalArts.

Gemma Files was born in England and raised in Toronto, Canada, and has been a journalist, teacher, film critic and an award-winning horror author for almost thirty years. She has published four novels, a story-cycle, three collections of short fiction, and three collections of speculative poetry; her most recent novel, Experimental Film, won both the 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the 2016 Sunburst Award for Best Novel (Adult Category). She is currently working on her next book.

Christopher Fowler is the multi award-winning author of nearly fifty novels and short story collections, including the acclaimed Bryant & May mysteries. His novels include Roofworld, Spanky, The Sand Men, and Hell Train, plus two volumes of memoirs, Paperboy (winner of the Green Carnation Prize), Film Freak, and The Book of Forgotten Authors. In 2015 he won the CWA Dagger In The Library for his body of work. His latest novel is The Lonely Hour. He lives in London and Barcelona, and blogs every day at www.christopherfowler.co.uk.

Cody Goodfellow has written nine solo novels and three with New York Times bestselling author John Skipp. Two of his short fiction collections, Silent Weapons For Quiet Wars and All-Monster Action, received the Wonderland Book Award. He wrote and co-produced the short films Stay At Home Dad, and Clowntown: An Honest Mis-Stake. He has also appeared in the background on numerous TV programs, as well as videos by Anthrax and Beck. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Lisa L. Hannett has had over seventy short stories appear in venues including Clarkesworld, Fantasy, Weird Tales, Apex, The Dark, and Year’s Best anthologies in Australia, Canada, and the US. She has won four Aurealis Awards, including Best Collection for her first book, Bluegrass Symphony, which was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Her first novel, Lament for the Afterlife, was published in 2015. Her latest collection of short stories, Songs for Dark Seasons, came out in April 2020. You can find her online at www.lisahannett.com and on Instagram @lisalhannett.

Kij Johnson’s short fiction has won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Sturgeon Awards, as well as the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire. She is the associate director for the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas, where she is also an associate professor. “Spar” won the Nebula Award for short story.

Tom Johnstone’s fiction has appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including the Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Black Books of Horror, Brighton—The Graphic Novel, Wicked Women, and Strange Tales V, Supernatural Tales, and Shroud Magazine. In addition he co-edited the British Fantasy Award-nominated austerity-themed anthology Horror Uncut: Tales of Social Insecurity and Economic Unease with the late Joel Lane. He lives with his partner and two children in Brighton, where he works as a gardener for the local authority. Find out more about Johnstone’s fiction at: www.tomjohnstone.wordpress.com.

Richard Kadrey is the New York Times bestselling author of the Sandman Slim supernatural noir series. Sandman Slim was included in Amazon’s “100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books to Read in a Lifetime,” and is in production as a feature film. Some of Kadrey’s other books include The Grand Dark, The Everything Box, Hollywood Dead, and Butcher Bird. He’s also written for Heavy Metal Magazine, and the comics Lucifer and Hellblazer.

Cassandra Khaw is a scriptwriter at Ubisoft Montreal. Her work can be found in places like the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and Tor.com. She has also contributed writing to games like Sunless Skies, Falcon Age, and Wasteland 3.

Caitlín R. Kiernan sold her first short story in 1993, and since then her short fiction has been collected in numerous volumes, beginning with Tales of Pain and Wonder, and including the World Fantasy Award-winning The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories, and most recently The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan. Her novels include The Red Tree and the Bram Stoker Award-winning The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.

Livia Llewellyn’s fiction has appeared in over forty anthologies and magazines and has been reprinted in multiple best-of anthologies, including The Best Horror of the Year, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. Her short story collections Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors and Furnace were both nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection. You can find her online at www.liviallewellyn.com.

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House and the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has won the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of “The New Vanguard,” one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.” Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

RC Matheson is a #1 bestselling author and screenwriter/producer the New York Times calls “a great horror writer.” He has created, written, and produced acclaimed TV series, mini-series and films, including cult favorite Three O’Clock High and Stephen King’s Battleground which won two Emmys. Matheson has worked with Steven Spielberg, Tobe Hooper, Nicholas Pileggi, Joe Dante, Roger Corman, Mel Brooks and many others. He has adapted novels by Dean Koontz, Whitley Strieber, Roger Zelazny, Stephen King, H.G. Wells and George R. R. Martin for film. Matheson’s short stories appear in his collections, Scars And Other Distinguishing Marks, Zoopraxis, Dystopia, and 130 anthologies, including many Best of the Year volumes. His novels include Created By and The Ritual of Illusion. Matheson is a professional drummer and studied privately with CREAM’s Ginger Baker.

Kirstyn McDermott has been working in the darker alleyways of speculative fiction for much of her career. Her two novels, Madigan Mine and Perfections, each won an Aurealis Award and her most recent book is Caution: Contains Small Parts, a collection of short fiction published by Twelfth Planet Press. She produced and co-hosted a literary discussion podcast, “The Writer and the Critic,” for several years and now lives in Ballarat, Australia, with fellow writer Jason Nahrung and their two cats. Kirstyn is currently completing a creative writing PhD at Federation University with a research focus on re-visioned fairy tales. “Painlessness” won the Aurealis Award and the Ditmar Award. www.kirstynmcdermott.com.

Seanan McGuire lives, works, and occasionally falls into swamps in the Pacific Northwest, where she is coming to an understanding with the local frogs. She has written a ridiculous number of novels and even more short stories. Keep up with her at www.seananmcguire.com. On moonlit nights, when the stars are right, you just might find her falling into a swamp near you.Priya Sharma’s fiction has appeared in Interzone, Black Static, Nightmare, The Dark and on Tor.com. She’s been anthologized in several Best of anthologies by editors such as Ellen Datlow, Paula Guran and Jonathan Strahan. “Fabulous Beasts” won the British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction and was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. The first collection of her short fiction, All the Fabulous Beasts was published by Undertow Publications in 2018 and won the Shirley Jackson Award and the British Fantasy Award, as well as being a Locus Award finalist. Her novella Ormeshadow is available from Tor. More about her work can be found at www.priyasharmawordpress.com.

Angela Slatter is the author of the Verity Fassbinder supernatural crime series (Vigil, Corpselight, Restoration) and nine short story collections, including The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings. Her gothic fantasy novels, All These Murmuring Bones and Morwood, will be out from Titan in 2021 and 2022 respectively. She’s won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, an Australian Shadows Award, and six Aurealis Awards. Her work’s been translated into French, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, Bulgarian and Russian. You can find her at www.angelaslatter.com, @AngelaSlatter on Twitter, and as @angelalslatter on Instagram for photos of food and dogs that belong to someone else.

Lucy Taylor is an award-winning author who has published seven novels and over a hundred short stories in anthologies and magazines. Her most recent work can be found in the anthologies The Big Book of Blasphemy, Cutting Edge, A Fistful of Dinosaurs, and Vagabond 001, 002, and 003. Her Stoker Award-winning novel, The Safety of Unknown Cities, was recently reprinted in German by Festa Verlag Publications and is currently being translated into Russian by Poltergeist Press. Taylor lives in the high desert outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Genevieve Valentine is a novelist, comic book writer, and cultural critic.

Shirley Jackson award-winner Kaaron Warren published her first short story in 1993 and has had fiction in print every year since. She has published five multi award-winning novels: Slights, Walking the Tree, Mistification, The Grief Hole and Tide of Stone, and seven short story collections, including the multi award-winning Through Splintered Walls. Her most recent novella, Into Bones Like Oil was nominated for the Stoker Award. “A Positive” won the Aurealis Award.

Alyssa Wong writes fiction, comics, and games. Her stories have won the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Locus Award. She was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her fiction has been shortlisted for the Hugo, Bram Stoker, and Shirley Jackson Awards. Her comics credits include Marvel, Star Wars, and Adventure Time. She has also written for Overwatch and Story and Franchise Development at Blizzard Entertainment.