Review: Monsterfuck (edited by Cash Torn)

Like their previous offering, the latest collection of queer and trans erotica from Incision Print is to-the-point about what you will find inside — there is indeed a plethora of monsters in this thrilling display of imagination and erotic possibility. Perhaps unsurprisingly given queer people’s relationship with the church, there is a predominance of demons, fallen angels and Satan-worship, like Anna Samson’s depiction of Lilith in The Switch. “Fuck Paradise!” Lilith narrares on her exit from the Garden of Eden, “I was free.” Stories by Theo Hartwell and verse by Jaydell similarly invite us to prostrate before the alter of the occult and the freedom it offers.

Werewolves and other creatures of the moon are also regular features, like E.K. Darnell’s Offering Under The Flower Moon and Salem Fluke’s Where The Wild Ones Nut. Des DeVivo’s Beyond Black Mirrors plays with the threat and allure of switching off and logging out, where the wild within and without mirror each other:

The sky is a cotton-candy swirl of pink, purple, and gold, and the jagged teeth of the pines beyond take generous bites. Night isn’t far off from me and this cabin, and my blood rushes hot at the thought of the back deck being bathed in moonlight. I close my eyes. I’ve been dreaming about this — dark, wonderful dreams — ever since I stumbled upon the videos.

Fraser Knox’s genuinely unsettling Wintersong sees Hal waiting in the woods for a visitor. The wind is beastly:

It slammed through snow-clad stone peaks and ripped into even the deepest valleys. It clawed at the frozen rivers, longing to toss the sleeping waters into a frenzy, but to settle for whipping up walls of sleet and snow instead. Ice sharp as cut glass driven by the gusts would slice exposed skin like razors. It blunted its frozen teeth on the wooden walls and tried to gnaw through the mortar packing between the logs.

Many explore the horror and promise of transformation. In Odile York’s Fallen Angels, the narrator is released from self-loathing through the instruction of the devil:

My back arches as you tear it, ripping it open and finally releasing the wings you had drawn onto me … part of me shakes off years of neglect.

The narrators Lea O’Hara’s hot and dusty Outback Ouroboros and Macsen K. Rhaff’s cold and wolf-ish Tassie-noir Beyond The Nothofagus both find their bodies changed into something that more closely resembles how they see themselves through their monstrous encounters. The shape of these monsters too is often fluid, prone to shifting, difficult to categorise and classify. They are Frankensteinian patchworks, glimpses of bodies in flickering light and shadows, resisting the the totality of knowing and understanding.

In law, politics and culture, queer bodies and desires are so often depicted as monstrous, permitting monstrous violence to be enacted upon us. Monsterfuck offers the pleasure of the tables turning, and the power of embracing what queer people are said to be. Like Torrey Peters’ Stag Dance, this is writing that is almost entirely outside the frame of heteronormative reference; what a relief. Monstrousness offers characters something they can’t have in the non-monstrous world, whether escaping “pre-bed conflicts that never had to happen,” in Maddison Stoff and Corey Jae White’s In The Backrooms, or escaping the binaries in The Eclipse by Christian Ryan. Ryan’s story of a club hookup on the blood moon serves as a vision statement for the collection:

Stories of shape-shifters disrupt our comfortable illusions. They challenge our strongly held belief that there is an order to things; that everything in the world is neatly packaged into “this” and “that”.

Into science and myth. Or sun-moon.

Male-female.

Gay-straight.

While these stories toy with many reactions — desire, disgust, fear — there is an enjoyable humour to many, like the punk polyamorous mermaids in Ménage À Mer, or the young researcher Jessen Parvolia in Corwyn Reed’s Licorice Wind who seeks an encounter with a creature in the woods. “Yes,” she thinks when she finds what she’s looking for, “This is all … valuable data.” M. K. Briar’s The Retrieval is a rather elaborate tale of a guildsperson charged with rescuing an alchemist couple who have fallen prey to their desire for monsters. Finding the couple infragrante delico, a slime monster tempts the protagonist:

We request pleasure, and pain, all at once. We request you throw off your clothing! Submit to the Black Tar Slime! Become one with us!

Some of the most sublime stories are also the slimiest, from Kris Kneen’s opening tale Eat Me (“my ejaculation is a swallowing”) or L x. acanthifolius’ Orchid On Oakmass (“the painted tip of his excitement emerges from his leaf spathe … his ridged spadix peels from his sheath, inflorescence and sticky with resin at the tip”). The aliens in Aunty Patrick’s Cum Star are having the best time ever destroying their man toy Henry (“no more than a tubular cosmic gateway for alien lovers to meet in his middle”), and The ShanMonster’s festering Human Centipede-via-Saw The Sick is truly bonkers but somehow romantic. These are stories about becoming unbound; as Anna Sansom writes The Switch, “We are everything… Man. Woman. Beast. God.”

Gay rating: 5/5 for queer monsters in every possible combination.