Obsession, addiction, and disease: They are themes that coexist as a strange hierarchy of social horror, like the raw matter of what makes a subculture tick, and how self-destruction often takes control of the individual long before they can identify the source of the hurt. They are what fuels The Body Harvest’s Will and Olivia, the would-be main characters of a virus-laden story, full of the sort of worry and want that comes from people not only down on their luck but also wounded to the core. Their obsession is finding and overcoming viruses. Their addiction is that feeling of coming off the worst symptoms, that euphoria of being on the mend. The disease at the heart of the story is society itself and all its various pitfalls and traps.
I’d like to think that The Body Harvest occupies a shelf full of books that showcase those three themes across a variety of subcultures both underground and mainstream. These are the sorts of books that showcase disease as a metaphor, or toxic group dynamics as a world unto its own. These are the sorts of books that exhibit thrills on a societal level, where the horror to be found is the way society operates and, as is often the case, willfully chooses to ignore the rot that continues to twist and contort its deeper circles. The following books would occupy that shelf; they are books that have rendered these themes in a balance that makes the very act of the reader choosing to inhabit the book be like peering into a dark corner of society. You find it as fascinating as it is frightening, and yet somewhere in those pages, maybe you’ve met someone that could easily have come from one of these books.
Crash by JG Ballard
We got to start things off with JG Ballard’s controversial novel, Crash. What is now known by many to be a fever dream of a story about people aroused by car crashes, Crash nosedives into a subculture obsessed with technology. They are so entwined with their obsessions that they live and breathe the fetish. James Ballard finds himself in the mess of a toxic group of people that share their interest in car crashes. Their leader Vaughan influences the group, including James, as they seek out the crash, hoping to be the star of their own deadly accident. For some the book is nightmare fuel, while for others, perhaps those reading into it like an armchair sociologist, Crash feels like a window into a subculture seeking an escape in their collective obsessions.
The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera
In The Transmigration of Bodies, author Yuri Herrera achieves something that is often attempted but seldom successful: He offers an uncanny look at the underbelly of a failing society. The book merges a plague narrative with hardboiled noir. There’s a city that is afflicted by a virus that spreads through its grimy claustrophobic spaces; there are crime syndicates and various hits being made. There’s our window into the world, a hitman named The Redeemer who finds themselves at the center of a war between crime families in the dying city. Herrera manages to keep the reader afloat through the grim reality that the society therein must face, even if it feels like there’s no way the story will end well.
A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
Perhaps one of Philip K. Dick’s most personal novels, A Scanner Darkly offers a darkly comic and at times shocking look at the drug culture of the 60s and 70s. It’s not just flophouse and drug dens though. Robert Arctor is an undercover officer seeking the source of the insanely addictive and deadly drug spreading like an epidemic throughout the circles of Los Angeles. Called Substance D, it’s reminiscent of the pill culture of the 2010s, and it’s incredibly addictive, especially for those without many options for escape. Arctor gets swept up into a subculture of drugs and paranoia, ultimately finding himself a victim of society’s heartless use and discard of people deemed addicts.
Negative Space by B.R. Yeager
B.R. Yeager’s novel may be one of the bleakest on this list (or shelf, if we’re keeping up with the metaphor), and yet it is also one of the most vulnerable and intimate. Written as an oral history of a group of friends living in a boring small town that faces something otherworldly. There’s a subculture of self-destruction, and soon it devolves into a suicide epidemic. The way Yeager renders the subculture is near perfection in its reflection of sickness and obsession. These are teenagers as aimless as they are worried about being aimless. Like anyone growing up, they feel the pressure to become something, and instead opt out by feasting on drugs, on self destructive acts, and more until reality itself unhinges itself from consciousness. Negative Space is the sort of book that doesn’t turn away from the worst that one might see when trying to understand the web of mental illness.
Nothing by Janne Teller
It’s so incredibly odd that Janne Teller’s Nothing is marketed as a young adult book. Maybe it’s some kind of act of marketing cunning or defiance, to have something this nihilistic and transgressive reach teenage minds. Who really knows. What I do know is that the contents within this book are the exact opposite of “nothing.” It’s about a group of teenagers, a social circle that falls apart from the inside out after one of its members decides to give up on life, climbs a tree and opts for nihilism. The group is disturbed by the act and proceeds to prove their friend wrong, gathering an increasingly disturbing array of evidence that aims to showcase meaning in life. The sheer obsession of their act mirrors their friend’s choice to do nothing: It’s that pressure to be a person, to have inherent value in their identity or else the world becomes too frightening a place. Nothing showcases a young social circle facing oblivion and realizes there’s no way to stop it.
Severance by Ling Ma
Ling Ma’s Severance is a disease thriller, yes, but it’s also something else entirely. Candace Chen is one of millions of employees of would-be faceless corporations in NYC when a virus changes everything, causing society itself to stop. Akin to what happened when we faced COVID-19, Severance showcases an accurate reality where gig workers, influencers, and other people seeking validation, people addicted to the dopamine rush of social media. It’s a great example of empathy, perhaps best showcased in how those afflicted by the deadly virus become caught in flux, mid task, repeating the mundane memories of their now defunct lives. It’s full of memory and pining, loneliness and aloneness, and most importantly a revelatory book that chooses to explore disease as a necessary, disruptive ingredient that forces society to look inward and find meaning beyond the pursuit of being an upstanding citizen that pays their bills, is able to have a social life, and essentially occupy the same role as everyone else in society.
Blindness by Jose Saramago
Jose Saramago’s dystopian novel, Blindness, would fit nicely right next to Ma’s Severance. They are both tales of a pandemic, a deadly virus that disrupts society, and what’s more: They both are dripping with a brand of empathy that shines through all the bleakness found in its pages. Blindness tells the tale of “the doctor’s wife” who is perhaps the only person unaffected by a mysterious disease that turns everyone blind. She pretends to be blind just to fit in, all the while becoming an unwilling leader-figure of sorts for a group of survivors trying to navigate the various terrors of a world compromised. Blindness explores how that disease brings out the worst in people, and in some ways, it could be far more trivial than the terrors people will do when such an important sense is stripped from them.
Consumed by David Cronenberg
Consumed feels like a vertical slice cut of some invisible subculture thriving in plain sight. Leave it up to body horror auteur David Cronenberg to pen a dastardly disturbing thriller built on complexity and a seemingly endless amount of conspiracies. It’s also sleek and hallucinatory, a book that captures that cross section of soulless media professionals and journalists willingly doing whatever it takes to capture society on its knees. Then there’s the layer involving cannibalism, fetish, and the untold pleasures (and profane acts) that take part when surrounded by like-minded terrors. Consumed is that sort of book that makes you second guess going to that party, touring a possible new social group, and/or believe the information media is feeding you.
The Plague by Albert Camus
This “shelf” needs to be bookended with Albert Camus’ classic. The Plague is timeless in its portrayal of a French city, and more so society, that falls apart in the face of a deadly plague spread through its sewers and public spaces via rats. Readers get to experience the events from the point of view of an ordinary citizen during the initially odd but unassuming omens. Rats dying in the streets in a pool of blood. Soon it’s people; by then society begins to show its true shades, Camus using the plague itself as a mirror’s reflection of society’s ability to destroy itself, become lost to the collective fear of disease and death. It also showcases how society is so obsessed with order that it will do anything to avoid chaos, even if it ironically feeds the entity, or virus, more fuel to evoke chaos.
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