The day is finally here. Our trans body horror anthology Bound in Flesh is available wherever books are sold.
An Anthology of Trans Body Horror brings together 13 trans and non-binary writers, using horror to both explore the darkest depths of the genre and the boundaries of flesh. A disgusting good time for all! Featuring stories by Hailey Piper, Joe Koch, Bitter Karella, and others. Edited by Lor Gislason.
Rather than introduce you to the book, I will let our kickass editor Lor Gislason do the honors:
When I posted a meme on Twitter alongside my desire for a body horror anthology penned by trans and non-binary authors, I could never have imagined it would lead to me editing a book. Then Max approached me with a very simple “ok, but what if that did exist?” Right now you are holding the result of that question—which was the fastest yes I’ve ever typed, by the way—the final group of stories that pushed their way into this world, naked and bloody and wonderful. Within these pages are months of work and love and I couldn’t be prouder.
As trans individuals, you could say we have a leg-up on understanding the emotions (both good and bad) surrounding living in a body. The joy when someone affirms your identity and the frustration when you’re denied that right. The violence we face just for being who we are. The way legislation (especially in the United States) denies people access to the care they need to live their lives. All of these things can be channelled into a story.
I’d like to thank Max for his guidance during this project, all our writers and everyone who submitted a story. To Babs for creating the perfect cover that they pulled out of nowhere. To the queer horror community for giving me a sense of belonging, and for the friendships I have fostered. To my partner, who came up with the anthology title, and who I love dearly.
To all our trans siblings, whether you’re out or not, this is for you.
Collected here are 13 stories of transformation, acceptance, growth and gore. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
Love,
Lor Gislason
If you pre-ordered it through our webstore or through Kickstarter, copies will begin shipping out this week. Apologies they haven’t already been mailed. We fell a bit behind with this month’s Ghoulish Book Festival (expect a fest recap in a future newsletter). If you’d like to order through our webstore, click HERE. All paperback orders there will also come with a signed book plate from the editor.
The anthology can also be purchased anywhere else you typically obtain books, including our personal favorite online outlet Bookshop.org.
Here is the full table of contents:
TABLE OF CONTENTS
“Wormspace” by LC von Hessen
“The Haunting of Aiden Finch” by Theo Hendrie
“Coming Out” by Derek Des Agnes
“Mama is a Butcher” by Winter Holmes
“Fall Apart” by gaast
“Lady Davelina’s Last Pet” by Charles-Elizabeth Boyles
“In The Garden of Horn, The Naked Magic Thrives” by Hailey Piper
“A Scream Lights Up The Sky” by Joe Koch
“Long Fingers” by Layne Van Rensburg
“A Brief History of The Santa Carcossa Archipelago” by Bitter Karella
“Show Me” by Amanda M. Blake
“Man of The House” by Lillian Boyd
“Looking for the Big Death” by Taliesin Neith
If you happen to read and enjoy the anthology, it would also be cool if you considered writing a review either on Goodreads or Storygraph (but no pressure!).
And now, before we leave you, I’d like to share the first story from Bound in Flesh. “Wormspace” by LC von Hessen was, without question, the perfect way to open the anthology. After you read it, we think you’ll see why. Enjoy.
WORMSPACE
LC von Hessen
No reputable fetish club would tell him how to find the Physician. No dungeon or play party, no email or direct message to an online kink discussion board or a BDSM professional, nowhere he dared to probe or stammer out his request saw him treated as anything but a crude edgelord, an undercover cop, or a pathetic and deeply troubled individual. A tap on the shoulder, a tug of the sleeve: Stop asking. That’s fucking stupid. / You need to leave. Don’t come here again. / Don’t bother us any more. / You’re banned. / You’re blocked. / Fuck off, man. Meanwhile, within him, the Worm continued, as always, to turn.
The Physician’s forte was neither safe nor sane and only nominally consensual. Many thought she didn’t exist and was only an urban legend or a sophomoric in-joke. A living caricature of a mad science domme, it was said that her unhinged clients eagerly volunteered for her clandestine backroom experiments. It was also said that these clients were not seen again. Except, on occasion, as specimens of grotesquerie for well-heeled connoisseurs of Such Things. Most likely, this was mere egotistical self-aggrandizement that had ballooned over time to the level of myth: one could only roll one’s eyes at that pretentious scene name alone. What’s your doctorate in, Physician? Is it butt stuff? More like the Proctologist, amirite?
And yet. His obsession was so intense that he spent nearly all of his not-insubstantial disposable income purchasing information about the Physician and her whereabouts, dropping hefty payments to such upstanding Dark Web users as xVictimizedx and woundfucker88. Naturally he was scammed. A lot. This was less due to naïveté on his part than a resigned belief that such pratfalls were intrinsic to the journey, a test of his sincerity. Such was Jimmy Barton’s desperation.
At long last an inquiry had finally, hopefully, borne fruit. Jimmy was instructed to retrieve a sealed missive at a covert drop-off point in a public park in his neighborhood, where it had been deposited by some dubious individual who served as one of her many minions. The Physician’s official seal, embossing a glob of black wax, depicted a modified Rod of Asclepius: a skull-headed snake wrapped around a scalpel. The missive contained only an address. Jimmy would have to travel there on his own dime. She would not discuss further matters remotely.
The Physician’s alleged address was in the basement level of an otherwise disused warehouse at the outskirts of a moderate-sized American city. Jimmy had to force open the rust-garnished fire door with his shoulder, leaving a smattering of reddish-brown residue on his formal suit jacket. He stepped forward and down, into a tunnel. A long string of sickly fluorescents mounted alongside bulbous metal tubes and ducts in the open ceiling illuminated the nondescript beige-and-white cinder blocks surrounding him.
This was clearly not a commercial dungeon. No wall of whips, crops, ropes, and paddles to show off her repertoire; no boudoir curtains or Inquisitional implements or dramatic lighting to set the mood. Rather than some generically exotic incense to mask patrons’ sweat and body odor, it smelled of cold, unsexy damp clinging to the insulation and the cement floor, along with a faint undercurrent of mold.
Aside from the electric hum overhead and Jimmy’s tentative steps, the only sound, which steadily increased in volume the further he walked, was a repetitive one-two echoing tap muffled nearby. This one-two rhythm continued for several seconds, then paused briefly, then began again. Some sort of janky machine, he assumed, running within the bowels of the basement.
Jimmy turned the corner.
The Physician held court over this fiefdom of sickly-lit cinder blocks and concrete in a squeaking latex lab coat. A small, plump woman of about 50 or 60 with dark-dyed hair and an elegant mien, she reclined in a black leather office chair, her sensible heels resting on the metal reception desk before her. She idly clicked and unclicked a ballpoint pen while studying the newly-arrived applicant with an utterly inscrutable expression.
Jimmy handed her the missive with its official seal, which she glanced at through cat-eye reading glasses on a silver chain.
“If you’ve got some kind of snuff fantasy,” she began, “you’re barking up the wrong tree. I do not kill people.” She crossed her legs. “It’s not an ethical thing. It’s just boring, to me.” The Physician spoke with an assured, velvet-lined voice. Her thin lips were painted a deep red verging on black, the color of menstrual clots.
“No, I, I don’t . . .” He shook his head . “My name’s Jimmy, by the w—”
“I don’t care.” She waved it off, eyes casing him up and down with distaste. “You still go by ‘Jimmy’ and you’re how old?”
Twenty-nine. I’ll be 30 next summer, he almost said, before realizing this was a rhetorical question meant to humiliate him.
“Sit.”
The lone available chair was a battered beige metal contraption parked in front of the desk. Lowering himself into this chair provoked immediate discomfort from the seat, sagging with a creak of complaint under his ass and thighs; the legs, just short enough to force his knees into acute angles; and the back, which dug into his lower spine at its bottom edge. It was difficult to sit up straight and downright impossible to sit still. He made no objection, certain this was by design.
—Squirm, wormy, squirm—
“Right. Let’s get down to it.” The Physician swung her legs below the desk, sat up, and tented her fingers. “Why are you here, Jimbo?”
Jimmy Barton clasped his own hands together, hunched forward in the terrible chair, his hair fallen loose, more supplicant than applicant. With little hesitation, he spat it out.
“I want to be flaccid. All the time.” The ragged desperation in his voice verged on aggressive.
A smirk of derision as the Physician’s eyes flicked down to his crotch.
“Mm. And you can’t wait for age to catch up with you.”
“No. It has to be as—as soon as possible.” He shifted and fidgeted as the Physician briskly shuffled through some mental database.
“Have you tried a regimen of SSRIs? A regular use of narcotics? Alcohol, cocaine?”
“But that’s . . . No, no. The effects are just temporary.”
“So you’d rather stay sober and possibly dysthymic. Why not a hypnotissst?” She teased out the last word with a grin, both of them knowing this suggestion was bullshit. He lowered his head and squeezed his hands together tightly.
“You know, of course, it would have been far cheaper to purchase a male chastity device. A decent cock cage would only cost a fraction, a tiny fraction of what you’ve already spent. Perhaps you could simply throw out the key.” She twirled the ballpoint pen between her middle and index fingers. “Anecdotally, it’s said to permanently decrease one’s ability to develop an erection when worn over an extended period.”
“I can’t . . . can’t wait that long,” he mumbled.
“So your impatience is now my problem. Why?”
Jimmy’s short nails dug into his dress pants at the knee, too flustered to speak.
“Do you want to be castrated, Jim-Jim?”
“I . . .”
“Because I’ll deflate that particular dream right now. Orchiectomy—that’s the technical term for human testicle removal—only eliminates the production of sperm, and frequently lowers libido as well, which I’ll assume, in your case, is a desirable effect regardless. But—and I’m speaking from personal experience here—it would not fully prevent erection. A common misperception, I know.
“I could simply cut your penis off at the root. Testicles, too. All of it.” She made a sweeping motion with one loose fist, the ballpoint pen as proxy for a scalpel or straight razor. “Just a Ken doll’s groin down there. With a little canal for the urethra. Would that satisfy you?”
The sheer contempt in the Physician’s voice dripped like bile. “Of course there could very likely be complications, but I genuinely don’t care what happens to you.” She shrugged. “Any halfway-decent pro-domme could tell you that, but in my case it’s true. No reason not to be honest. Since you’ve made your way here, gone to all that trouble. We ought to be scrupulously honest with one another.” She fixed him with a hard stare and clutched the pen in both fists. “I know and you know, Jimothy, that you, with your money, could easily find a surgeon to carve up your penile ligaments. What do you really want from me?”
Jimmy flushed, sweating, anxiety coursing through his cramped posture. Of course she was on to him. Of course he was lying to himself. She was a professional. She was the professional. He could never, ever hide. Crumpled into himself, he considered his words with great care before pushing them out, one by one, as if psychologically constipated. He had never revealed this aloud before and spoke with intense deliberation.
“I want . . . to become . . . a worm.”
The Physician did not laugh or scoff, but nodded soberly for him to continue.
It had begun with the nightmare. This dream had followed him as long as he could remember, ever since his tiny mind first had the capacity to visualize objects and record memories: the Worm being birthed, the primordial scream, surrounded on all sides by dirt clotting his throat and intestines, a mouth and anus open forever.
Throughout his childhood with its many outward comforts, the nightfall of his unconscious brought him back to that perfectly cylindrical dirt tunnel with a waiting black eclipse at the end. There was no light of any kind, but in his mind’s eye, he saw because he did not need to see: in the tunnel, one had no use for eyes. The tunnel was made for him, by him; he had come to understand that it represented the inmost nature of his soul. If “Jimmy Barton,” the name arbitrarily affixed to this lamentable body, were to be bisected vertically from stem to stern, spiritually if not literally, the tunnel is what one would find. In this, the essence of the humble earthworm.
Trapped in a suffocating cocoon that leaked and rotted about him, so ill-fitting around his screaming bones, so tight and constrictive: his soul, he often felt, was caught in the gullet of a great python in the shape of a human man. Joints! Teeth! Hair! The vagaries of smell and taste! The virus of language! The purgatory of custom and culture! Why, why was he cursed to be human?
Thus he knew, ultimately, that the scripted, negotiated roles of S/M were not enough, would never be enough. He didn’t want to go back to the office, back to his condo, back to his latest round of quotidian errands or distractions, after the scene was over. He didn’t want to negotiate a 24/7 role to play. He didn’t want to wear a costume, adopt a persona. He wanted, quite simply, to be. The primeval ancestor of countless millennia, squirming from water to land, squirming back to negate his own existence. He wanted to enter subspace and never leave, in the manner of one who ingests constant hallucinogens to replicate a state of permanent psychosis until it is no longer a replication. He didn’t want to know, or remember, that this was a simulacrum. He wanted to exist without desire and without doubt. To slither and writhe, to eat and excrete, without the human infant’s cries and developmental milestones and need for an adult caretaker. To say, to think, I am a worm now, but without words or images. To be mindless. To be.
Jimmy explained this as best he could, never having been a very eloquent man. The Physician nodded thoughtfully, listening with care. Then stood, and beckoned him forward.
“Follow me.”
She turned the corner and, retrieving a key from a pocket of the latex lab coat, unlocked a nondescript metal door.
The two of them stepped into a long, dim, rectangular room. At the flip of a switch, a row of floodlights blinked on overhead. Revealing, in one strike, both the source of the muffled machine-like rhythm Jimmy had overheard in the tunnel and a prime example of the Physician’s skills.
The first thing he noticed was a shapely pair of women’s bare legs, outfitted with black patent-leather pumps. These shoes were the source of the rhythm, producing a tinny trip-trap clip-clap sound as they ran across the bare concrete floor: a dull flash of silver as the shoes lifted from the ground exposed a metal plate installed beneath each sole, makeshift tap heels to shift the reverb. The owner of the legs would run one way, come to a halt a few feet before the end of the room, turn sharply on one heel, and run in the other direction; then turn again, repeat the process, back and forth, ad infinitum.
From head to low hip, just concealing the crotch and buttocks, the figure’s body was entirely bound up in multiple layers of latex. The topmost layer, shrink-wrapped around a torso with arms crossed mummy-like over the chest, was a striking iridescent grey-blue, embellished with scale print. It—she?—resembled a grand bipedal chrysalis, or would have if not for the absurd presence of a goggle-eyed, gawp-mouthed fish head atop the shoulders, alongside flopping latex fins and cosmetic gills.
“She was the scion of a good family,” said the Physician at Jimmy’s side. “‘Good’ simply meaning ridiculously wealthy. You would certainly have heard of them, unless you’d grown up Amish or in some sort of survivalist commune. A party girl, socialite. A very chipper girl. Early twenties, or so she was back then. A Disney princess type.” The Physician mimed a brief curtsey. “She came to me wanting to become a mermaid. She was quite adamant about that. Although, to be frank, she wasn’t at all specific.”
Jimmy stared at the running figure, with its flapping false fins and mouth, its pin-up girl gams, and understood.
“Look at her run,” said the Physician, with uncommon warmth. “She’s swimming.”
Tip-tap-tip-tap-tip-tap-tip-tap—squeeeak—Tip-tap-tip-tap-tip-tap-tip-tap
“She’s fed with a concealed IV tube. Urinates and defecates on a timer: there’s a metal bucket set aside for that purpose. Her body has been completely depilated because fish, of course, do not have fur outside of novelty taxidermist gaffs.” She pointed to the mermaid’s false head. “They’re well-hidden, but she has two small holes for her nostrils in deference to her mammalian need for oxygen. Eventually I think she ought to have a blowhole installed. Her arms are quite withered by now, little Tyrannosaur winglets. They’re due for amputation soon. She can hear, a little. She knows simple commands.”
The Physician sharply clapped her hands twice in succession. “¡Olé!”
The mermaid paused in mid-stride. She stood at the end of the room, one leg stiff and bracing, the other stomping at the ground and kicking back imaginary dirt before angling her torso like a primed cannon and barreling forward in a sprint to charge at an invisible red cape. Another two claps from the Physician and she paused again before continuing to “swim” at her normal pace.
“Is she lobotomized?” Jimmy whispered.
“Oh no.” The Physician smiled. “She’s a mermaid.”
Jimmy’s eyes were fixed on the mermaid’s legs. Her calves were lithe, yet quite muscular. A thin, glistening trail trickled down from her inner thighs to trace the path of her route on the concrete, and he wondered if it was merely sweat from the combination of tight latex and her unceasing exertions, or if it also indicated a curious, constant arousal.
Determining he had seen enough, the Physician stepped back out of the room as Jimmy followed. She locked the door behind them, leaving the mermaid to run in darkness.
“Now think, and think hard, Jimbles, before you give your answer.” She fanned a hand at the door, nodding soberly, then stared back into him. “Knowing what you know now, would you still like to request my services?”
And Jimmy Barton looked down, from the Physician’s keen eyes and firm lips to his own fidgeting fingers, to his scuffed businessman’s brogues, to the cold concrete beneath; and he shrank, bit by bit, bone by bone, into nothing, the Worm turning through his nerves, his innards, the pathetic folds of his cerebrum. The tunnel opened at last, and he could only fall through to the black eclipse.
* * *
Some time later, a new applicant has dedicated large sums of money to locating the Physician, and their investment has recently paid off. In the maintenance level of a disused office complex, with tentative steps past bare sheetrock walls, they clutch a black-sealed missive in one sweating hand, nose full of the lingering smell of stale sawdust from never-finished construction.
A slow, regimented back-and-forth clomp echoes from an unseen room as the Physician flips a light switch to show off an example of her previous work. There, in a man-sized plexiglass trough full of dirt: a near-blind, toothless spine, arms amputated and legs severed and truncated into a tail, wrapped in a glistening non-skin of ringed pink latex. It flails and squirms, mouthfuls of dirt passing through the callused gums of its perpetually open maw, back out through its cloaca. And if the applicant cares to look closely enough, in the lone visible eye lurks a horrid but unmistakable spark of intelligence.
