thoughts on two very unsettling books featuring many, many bugs

Joe Koch, Invaginies

Some years ago, during a point in time when I was listening to a lot of The Soft Boys, I suggested that some ambitious editor should commission a horror anthology based on the band’s music. Mostly, I had their song “Kingdom of Love” in mind; specifically, I was thinking of these lines:

You’ve been laying eggs under my skin

Now they’re hatching out under my chin

Now there’s tiny insects showing through

And all them tiny insects look like you

Do you like your post-punk with a side of body horror? Because I sure do. But I’m here now in A.D. 2025 to say that this proposed anthology is no longer necessary, because Joe Koch’s new collection fits the bill perfectly well.

All of which is to say — and this is a motif in much of the fiction of Koch’s that I’ve read, especially The Wingspan of Severed Hands — there are plenty of bugs in these stories. If insects creep you out, as they do me, you will almost certainly flinch while reading this collection. All of this is meant as a compliment, incidentally.

This collection abounds with moments of transformation and epiphany, most of which involve visceral imagery or viscera, full stop. There’s also what might be the most whiplash-inducing sentence I’ve encountered in a long time, found partway through “Convulsive, Or Not At All”: “Five thousand years later, on the day of the spaceship’s inaugural launch, Zhante the son of man unblocks their dad.”

Stephen Gregory, The Woodwitch

I’d picked up Stephen Gregory’s The Cormorant a couple of years ago and dug it quite a bit; tales of psychological unease where the supernatural may or may not be a going concern are generally of interest to me, and this one did not disappoint. That The Woodwitch had an introduction by the always-reliable Paul Tremblay further piqued my interest. And what I got was a story of the most unsettling beings of all: incels.

Not that protagonist Andrew Pinkney would describe himself as such. (Also, this book was first published in 1988.) Pinkney is a young man with a nominally promising future who’s living in temporary seclusion after he was overtaken by a fit of rage and struck his girlfriend. You’d hope that most people in that situation would think about their own lives and how to make sure something like that never happens again. Unfortunately, this is now what young Andrew opts to do.

Instead, his plan involves cultivating the type of mushroom that gives the novel its title. Also known as Phallus duplicatus — and yes, that implies exactly what you think it does — said mushroom is spread by flies, which means that Andrew is farming both fungi and flies, and if you think there’s the potential for things to get very disgusting, you’re on the right track. The Woodwitch is a slim novel; it’s hard to imagine spending much more time in Andrew’s world than this. But for the story it’s telling, it’s an especially unnerving tale of arrogance and embracing one’s worst impulses.