Inside the rise of femgore literature
A young girl watches her mother roast a boy’s body, slick with fat like a rump steak. It sizzles in the pan, before she gently peels the skin off and tears into the juicy flesh. Plate licked clean, the rest of his carcass winds up in the freezer, preserved for when she’s next ravenous…No we haven’t just woken you up from a nightmare. Instead, it's a borrowed scene from Lucy Rose's The Lamb, just one of the radical new novels in the growing genre of femgore literature.
In the past few years, while much of the book market has been dominated (thanks in part to BookTok) by fast-paced swoon-worthy romcoms (looking at you, Emily Henry), a new literary phenomenon is emerging. Known informally as femgore, the genre is a sub-section of horror written about female protagonists by female authors and often featuring disgusting, gruesome and boundary-pushing prose, with narratives covering body horror, female rage, murder, unhinged women, obsession and profanity.
You only have to look at releases like Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts, which sold over 30,000 copies since its 2020 debut, The Sunday Times-bestseller The Eyes are The Best Part by Monika Kim and TikTok favourite Bunny by Mona Awad to recognise the movement in motion. And this month alone, three more hyped novels join the roster; Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito, This Immaculate Body by Emma Van Stratten and Bat Eater by Kylie Lee Baker, with many more to come later this year. Unlike traditional horror, these novels aren’t about the jump-scare on the page, but rather the haunting and visceral energy they encourage you to feel inside. But why are we swapping ‘friends to lovers’ for ‘lovers to, er, cannibals’ right now?
The Lamb by Lucy Rose
Light and fluffy rom-coms will always have a place in our hearts, but readers are craving something meatier (pardon the pun). According to The Bookseller (a magazine covering publishing news) 2023 was a record breaking year for horror fiction, with publishers noting the increase in submissions in the genre from both sides of the pond. Though female readers have long been interested in thrillers and true crime, these novels are often focused on the male serial killers or detectives, with women either the victims or a footnote in the narrative. And let’s not forget the many novels in which female serial killers carry out rage-based murders - but little else. Instead, femgore pulls elements from folklore, thrillers, horror and dark academia, in turn offering well-rounded character arcs and narratives with more dimension.
Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that the subgenre is having its moment right at a time when female autonomy is being threatened more than ever. That visceral, reaction-inducing female-led stories would grab our attention, just as our freedoms and rights are under the spotlight. "Women have had enough of their bodies being a site of fetishisation, horror and exploitation,” explains Romilly Morgan, a publisher at Brazen Books. “From the rise in deep fake pornography, to the endless close-ups of brutalised female corpses in true crime docs, to even our reproductive rights being used as political pawn pieces in the US – it’s all too much. In reaction, women [create] a world in which they are the ones in control, playing with the exact mundane and everyday brutality they have been exposed to for decades.”
Though romcoms and other genres of fiction give a much-needed form of escapism and allows us to explore other sides of femininity, femgore provides a cathartic release of rage, and allows women to embrace a darker side of femininity - one we're so often not allowed to express in real life. “There is very little space or patience for female rage in the outside world, so they’ve had to turn it to the page. You will never see the anger of women in history books, but you will find it in their fiction. And ‘femgore’ is where it is currently being recorded,” adds Morgan.
This Immaculate Body by Emma Van Straaten
When it comes to the female form, which continues to be picked apart, examined, and held to impossibly high beauty standards, the often graphic portrayals of our bodies and their reality in these novels is refreshing. Reading descriptions about body hair, carnal functions, and foul smells feels grotesque and invasive at first. But then you begin to question yourself and realise even in literature, women have been taught to see their bodies as something glamorous and pure - to the extent that we're programmed to feel squeamish at even the mention of menstrual blood.
Unlike the many female-led revenge thrillers we’ve seen in recent years, femgore is not always about levelling up the patriarchy and taking revenge on the men who have wronged us. It’s about the complicated relationships between ourselves, and our bodies, and with other women, too. In Rose’s The Lamb the main driving force is the complex dynamic between mother and daughter, (who just so happen to be cannibals).
But that said, it would be remiss not to mention the strong sexual elements to these novels, too. Clark’s Boy Parts explores the complicated connection between the protagonist and the many men that she talked pleasure from overpowering and often humiliating. While we as readers may not experience those feelings to the same degree, sex and relationship therapist Cate Mackenzie sees these novels as a way to decolonise the sexual space for women. As she explains, the characters allow “women [to] no longer [be] the object or afraid of men, and [the sexual scope] is dismantled to the extent that they can take a man’s life. This can create jeopardy and erotic charge.”
It’s a power dynamic that’s being explored a lot in recent art, literature and film, and reflects what has long gone on in the animal world, Mackenzie argues. In the same way, The Lamb follows the narrator’s mother, who attracts stray people before eating them - female spiders have been known to eat their mates after sex. Essentially, authors are only holding a mirror up to what already exists in nature.
While it’s true that the savagery depicted in femgore is hardly ever unleashed by women in real life, it’s also incredibly freeing to see such topics questioned and explored in the safe space of fiction. These novels offer us the chance to look horror right in the face and take some its strength into reality, while the world around us continues to target women’s existence. It’s a way of exploring our sexuality, our obscured femininity, and internal passion without feeling judged. But we’ll definitely stick to roasting chicken for now.
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