Into body: How writer feedback unstitched the gothic roots of my modern horror by Jac Silver

Embarking on the thrill ride that was submitting to the third volume of Twisted 50, a few ideas immediately sprang to mind. All of them flexed and convulsed in bodily horror. 

That wasn’t a surprise. Injecting horror into the body is a method that increases the options for worming into the minds of characters and readers. It’s also an irresistible challenge, especially when squeezing a story into a non-negotiable word count: carefully paring down the excess, taking a blunt or subtle knife to the prose. It’s a thrill to see new jolts and shocks come from condensed sentences and tauter turns of phrase. 

However, a bigger thrill came from the innovation of Twisted 50 III — feedback from fellow authors and the chance to reshape a story from their comments and notes. It was a revelation — let me peel it back:

I’d wanted the story’s characters to bounce around a familiar base — contemporary art, playing on its grip on news, culture and weight of history primed for horror: The dissection (Hirst’s severed sharks), surprise (Banksy) and the restless modernity (NFTs and AI) all help. But it also, usefully, consumes itself, endlessly wiping the slate clean rather than reliably building on the shoulders of giants. 

On the canvas, themes of resentment, modernity, and rivalry were mapped out in ambiguity and dichotomy. I set to work with the instruments, ratcheting and building up the characters. From teetering bulks to bruised and scrawny youths, I abandoned names, creating a universe of characters defined by their profession or position and carried through their emotions and actions. 

Then, fellow Twisted 50 III writers came for that nameless flesh, and their comments cut straight through. That’s the thing with readers (and reading writers): even if they’re not looking, they see. In the flesh, their notes bolstered the structure and rationale and fed into more complex twists and broken bodies. Twisting, after all, was on the jar, or in this case, the tank. But they also dug out the story’s influences, where vintage undertones ruptured the modern sheen. 

Gothic body horror was there in spades. It reached back to a single source, one packed with implications: Frankenstein. from the distortion of life to the mesmerising philosophical and real consequences of actions and playing God. Of wasted, perhaps misplaced abilities and the raging consequences of ego. And with that comes a tale about responsibility.

It was all in there, clear as day in the into-body experience I’d undertaken. It had just taken other writers to get to it. It’s a brilliant and long lineage that reaches back to 1818, but Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein isn’t an anchor. It’s a journey. And most of all, it’s alive.