The Anatomy Shelf Issue #13 (May 2022)
Thank you for subscribing to The Anatomy shelf, a monthly newsletter exploring the body in literature and history, dedicated in bringing you the latest news! The text (blurbs, bios, events etc) have all been copied from the original source.
This is a very special issue (lucky number 13) of The Anatomy Shelf as it marks one whole year since I started it! A HUGE thank you to everyone for supporting this newsletter! I have had so much fun interviewing fantastic authors, reviewing phenomenal books, and sharing current and exciting news with you all over the past year. Thank you to everyone who sent in an item or submission! This issue features the wonderful Charlotte Winter who has submitted a fantastic and beautifully heartfelt piece. You will find it as the featured item. As it is also 125 years of Dracula, this issue also hosts a vampire-themed book recommendation special! You will find this under ‘Current News.’
Thank you to everyone who makes this possible, cheers to the next year!
If you wish to submit to The Anatomy Shelf, please read the submission guidelines & contact information via the link below:
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
I am looking for written pieces, reviews, articles, short fiction, images, photography, art, and more, all related to the body in history, literature, and art, so please get in touch!
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CONTENTS:
FEATURED:
The Weird: A Love Letter by Charlotte Winter
CURRENT NEWS:
‘Dracula: 125 Years of the Count’
COMING SOON:
A sneak-peak of what’s to come…
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FEATURED
The Weird: A Love Letter by Charlotte Winter
I had a seizure three years ago and remember the memory of it very well. Since then, I have been preoccupied with a weird state of horror towards my own body and how my brain computes my physical spatiality in relation to the world around me. The seizure started as an uncontrollable tremor in the fingers on my left hand and colonised the rest of my body with frightening ease until the only body part I could control was, very helpfully, my eyelids. I remember squeezing my eyes shut, and calmly deciding to give myself over to the situation.
When I woke up on the ground (with a cigarette filter lodged in my temple if you’re interested, unbeknownst to me at the time), the 999 call handler asked me to feel my chest to see if I had a temperature. When I took my hand away, I realised it was covered in blood. I also suspected that it was possibly not my own hand, but rather one that had been stitched onto my wrist while I had been unconscious. Later in the hospital I also discovered that I could see my skull through the hole in my head. I decided that it was definitely a good idea to touch it.
My psychiatrist sent me for tests and, due to the human error of the Neuro-technician who did my EEG, I was misdiagnosed with Epilepsy. They told me three things: don’t sleep with more than one pillow because you might suffocate in the night; don’t swim or take a bath and certainly don’t shower if you are alone in the house in case you drown; and only eat in the company of others in case you choke to death. Armed with these 3 directives and the first-hand knowledge of what my own skull looked and felt like, the entire topography of my existence shifted.
From then, I was hospitalised twice more due to seizures and began to experience déjà vu constantly. Sometimes I would be walking down the street and my entire vision would flip 90 degrees so that everything was upside down. Eventually, buildings before me would triple in size and I would feel tiny. I was told these were just different types of seizures and although they felt incredibly real when experienced, they weren’t real experiences in themselves. I had control over neither my body nor the way my brain computed reality by this point.
It took ten months to see the neurologist and start treatment. He informed me that my EEG results had been read incorrectly and it was likely that what they had captured was the sound of my tongue tapping on the roof of my mouth. I didn’t have Epilepsy and my first seizure was dissociative and caused by untreated OCD. After that, my brain was told that it had epileptiform activity and told my body to behave the way it thought it was supposed to. Relief, obviously! It hadn’t been real, and it was all over. Due to the tricky nature of trauma, however, the unreality of what happened remained supremely real to me.
Cathy Caruth was right when she said that, due to the nature of trauma, language can never adequately describe it. In order to process the trauma of my unreality I had to change the way I approached the very things that had established my sense of the ‘real’ in the first place. Who is supposed to establish the boundaries of the real? Does it even matter? If it does, who is well-enough equipped to even recognise when we step beyond those boundaries?
Weird Fiction has given me a way of approaching these questions. I suddenly had first-hand experience of the affect that Weird Fiction writers aim to conjure and began to devour as much as possible in search of answers. According to Jeff VanderMeer, we do not perceive the borders of our experiences and can only see something hazy if we look upon it from a distance. Thomas Ligotti sees the development of self-awareness as a devolutionary accident. He argues that this causes us nothing but suffering because it triggers a need to create, categorise, and delineate meaningful boundaries in order to try and forget about the fact that we are all going to die. Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor demonstrate how worldbuilding can still be cohesive despite a total lack of boundaries establishing the difference between normal and abnormal.
Even outside of fiction, we are taught to pathologise neurodiversity because it does not seamlessly give itself to the meritocratic ranking system of End-Stage Capitalism which tries to enforce strict definitions of success. Anything different is ‘different’ because it does not fit within the definitions of success that such structures rely on for their own perpetuation. Even then, assuming that every neurotypical brain is wired in the exact same way is a bold statement and a weird hill to die on, and yet we are out here breathless.
I am constantly told that my psychosomatic experiences were not ‘real,’ and yet to me I experienced them in the exact same way I experienced those buildings when they were suddenly massive before me. This means that I experienced the ‘real’ and unreality at the same time and although they contradicted each other they were equally ‘real.’ My medical trauma has rewired my brain – even now when I’m stressed, I know that I’m stressed because my entire body dissociates from my left hand and my eyelids. I know when I need to take a break because I start having déjà vu. My experiences of unreality have even directly impacted my future because, in a desperate attempt to explain and categorise what was once my reality has led me to a PhD in Weird Fiction.
This desperate attempt to understand the trauma of my unreality has triggered an understanding that just because medical professionals told me what I was experiencing wasn’t real doesn’t mean it wasn’t real. This acknowledgement was a gateway for me. Our bodies can be both real and unreal at once and that makes them Weird; our bodies categorise experience and show us that experience cannot be categorised. My body was both real and Weird at once. Equally, Weird Fiction is not about transgressing established boundaries. Instead, it forces us to experience a reality where those boundaries are annihilated by the recognition that we don’t know what we don’t know. When we recognise that we don’t know what we don’t know, our bodies become the landscape of the Weird.
© Charlotte Winter 2022
Thank you so much, Charlotte, for sharing your incredible story. You can follow charlotte on Instagram: @weirdcharl_ Charlotte also hosts a monthly book club dedicated to Weird Fiction, you can find it HERE.
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CURRENT NEWS
‘Dracula: 125 Years of the Count’
Earlier this month, (May 26th) Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker (8 November 1847 – 20 April 1912) turned 125 years old. There were a variety events to celebrate this occasion, including Whitby Abbey holding a place in the Guinness World Record Book for having the largest gathering of vampires (1369 to be exact). Read more about the Whitby World Record here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-61597097
I also hosted the #FangsOutForDrac125 read-a-long/watch-a-long which was a huge success over on Instagram, thank you to everyone who joined in and made the celebration FANGTASTIC! Use the hashtag to see all the wonderful posts!
To celebrate on The Anatomy Shelf, here are some classic and modern vampire stories to read if you haven’t filled your Dracula fix yet, equipped with some stunning re-printed editions!
The Classics
Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (Pushkin Press, ISBN: 978178227584, 160 pages) Hardback, £9.99
In an isolated castle deep in the Austrian forest, Laura leads a solitary life with only her ailing father for company. Until one moonlit night, a horse-drawn carriage crashes into view, carrying an unexpected guest - the beautiful Carmilla. So begins a feverish friendship between Laura and her mysterious, entrancing companion. But as Carmilla becomes increasingly strange and volatile, prone to eerie nocturnal wanderings, Laura finds herself tormented by nightmares and growing weaker by the day...
Pre-dating Dracula by twenty-six years, Carmilla is the original vampire story, steeped in sexual tension and gothic romance.
More information: https://www.waterstones.com/book/carmilla/sheridan-le-fanu/9781782275848
Dracula: 125th Anniversary Edition (Telos Publishing, ISBN-10 : 1845832019, 328 pages) Paperback, £12.99
For 125 years, Dracula has been thrilling and inspiring generations of readers. This is the classic vampire novel, reprinted along with Dracula’s Guest, once included in the manuscript of Dracula, plus an extended ending to the novel that was deleted from the final typescript.
‘Significant to Dracula’s initial and enduring appeal are centuries-old myths of the vampire, which Bram presented as fact. While religion is the official gatekeeper for the afterlife, myth and folklore have always provided options to explain the otherwise unexplainable, and tales of the undead have abided as long as the dead themselves.’
— From the introduction by Dacre Stoker
Contains a new afterword by USA Today bestselling author Samantha Lee Howe looking at the interpretations and influence of Dracula in modern film and television adaptations.
The Blood of the Vampire by Florence Marryat (Read Books, ISBN10 1528710657, 318 pages) Paperback, £12.99
First published in 1897, "The Blood of the Vampire" is a vampire novel by prolific writer Florence Marryat. The story revolves around one Miss Harriet Brandt, the daughter of a mad scientist and a voodoo priestess who leaves her home in Jamaica for the first time to travel to Europe. However, Harriet is not a normal young woman, as everybody who gets close to her becomes ill or even dies. Boasting a sensational plot and utterly bizarre characters, Florence Marryat's Victorian vampire tale constitutes a must-read for fans of the genre. Florence Marryat (1833 - 1899) was a British actress and author. She is remembered for her sensational novels and her relationships with numerous famous spiritual mediums during the 19th century. Other notable works by this author include: "Love's Conflict" (1865), "Her Father's Name" (1876), "There is No Death" (1891) and "The Spirit World" (1894), and "The Dead Man's Message" (1894). Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with the original text and artwork.
More information: https://www.bookdepository.com/Blood-Vampire-Florence-Marryat/9781528710657?ref=grid-view&qid=1653992447125&sr=1-3
The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre by John Polidori, edited by Robert Morrison & Chris Baldick (Oxford World's Classics: Oxford University Press, ISBN: 9780199552412, 320 pages)Paperback, £7.99
`Upon her neck and breast was blood, and upon her throat were the marks of teeth having opened the vein: - to this the men pointed, crying, simultaneously struck with horror, "a Vampyre, a Vampyre!"'
John Polidori's classic tale of the vampyre was a product of the same ghost-story competition that produced Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Set in Italy, Greece, and London, Polidori's tales is a reaction to the dominating presence of his employer Lord Byron, and transformed the figure of the vampire from the bestial ghoul of earlier mythologies into the glamorous aristocrat whose violence and sexual allure make him literally a 'lady-killer'. Polidori's tale introduced the vampire into English fiction, and launched a vampire craze that has never subsided. `The Vampyre' was first published in 1819 in the London New Monthly Magazine. The present volume selects thirteen other tales of the macabre first published in the leading London and Dublin magazines between 1819 and 1838, including Edward Bulwer's chilling account of the doppelganger, Letitia Landon's elegant reworking of the Gothic romance, William Carleton's terrifying description of an actual lynching, and James Hogg's ghoulish exploitation of the cholera epidemic of 1831-2.
More information: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-vampyre-and-other-tales-of-the-macabre/john-polidori/robert-morrison/9780199552412
The Contemporary
The Making of Gabriel Davenport: Volume 1 (The Gabriel Davenport Series) by Beverley Lee, (Ink Raven Press, 2016, ISBN-10: 0993549004, 270 pages), Paperback, £7.99
Menacing dark fantasy and horror combine in the first book of this reader acclaimed supernatural series (Gabriel Davenport) from British author Beverley Lee.
Something is waiting for its time to rise.
Beth and Stu Davenport moved to the sleepy English village of Meadowford Bridge to give their young son, Gabriel, an idyllic childhood. But one night a hidden, ancient darkness shatters their dream and changes their lives forever.
Years later, Gabriel searches for answers about his mysterious past. His life unravels as he discovers that the people he loves and trusts harbour sinister secrets of their own. As the line blurs between shadow and light; and he becomes the prize in a deadly nocturnal game, Gabriel must confront the unrelenting, malevolent force that destroyed his family all those years ago.
His choice: place his trust in a master vampire, or give himself to the malignant darkness.
Is there a lesser of two evils—and how do you choose?
More information: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Making-Gabriel-Davenport/dp/0993549004/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1653992780&sr=1-4
Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda (Little, Brown Book Group
ISBN: 9780349015613, 256 pages) Hardback, £14.99
Lydia is hungry. She's always wanted to try sashimi, ramen, onigiri with sour plum stuffed inside - the food her Japanese father liked to eat. And then there is bubble tea and the vegetables grown by the other young artists at the London studio space she is secretly squatting in. But Lydia can't eat any of this. The only thing she can digest is blood, and it turns out that sourcing fresh pigs' blood in London - where she is living away from her vampire mother for the first time - is much more difficult than she'd anticipated.
Then there are the humans: the people at the gallery she interns at, the strange men who follow her after dark, and Ben, a goofy-grinned artist she is developing feelings for. Lydia knows that they are her natural prey, but she can't bring herself to feed on them.
If Lydia is to find a way to exist in the world, she must reconcile the conflicts within her - between her demon and human sides, her mixed ethnic heritage, and her relationship with food, and, in turn, humans. Before any of this, however, she must eat.
More information: https://www.waterstones.com/book/woman-eating/claire-kohda/9780349015613
The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix (Quirk Books, ISBN: 9781683691433, 352 pages) Hardback, £18.99
This funny and fresh take on a classic tale manages to comment on gender roles, racial disparities, and white privilege all while creeping me all the way out. So good. Zakiya Dalila Harris, author of The Other Black Girl. Now in paperback, Steel Magnolias meets Dracula in this New York Times best-selling horror novel about a women's book club that must do battle with a mysterious newcomer to their small Southern town. Bonus features: Reading group guide for book clubs Hand-drawn map of Mt. Pleasant Annotated true-crime reading list by Grady Hendrix And more! Patricia Campbell s life has never felt smaller. Her husband is a workaholic, her teenage kids have their own lives, her senile mother-in-law needs constant care, and she s always a step behind on her endless to-do list. The only thing keeping her sane is her book club, a close-knit group of Charleston women united by their love of true crime. At these meetings they re as likely to talk about the Manson family as they are about their own families. One evening after book club, Patricia is viciously attacked by an elderly neighbor, bringing the neighbor's handsome nephew, James Harris, into her life. James is well traveled and well read, and he makes Patricia feel things she hasn’t felt in years. But when children on the other side of town go missing, their deaths written off by local police, Patricia has reason to believe James Harris is more of a Bundy than a Brad Pitt. The real problem? James is a monster of a different kind and Patricia has already invited him in. Little by little, James will insinuate himself into Patricia s life and try to take everything she took for granted including the book club but she won t surrender without a fight in this blood-soaked tale of neighborly kindness gone wrong.
More information: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-southern-book-clubs-guide-to-slaying-vampires/grady-hendrix/9781683691433
I’ve loved each and every one of these books and would wholeheartedly recommend you add these to your bookshelves!
COMING SOON TO THE ANATOMY SHELF…
I had the most amazing time at ChillerConUK, it was wonderful to meet so many lovely people in the horror industry, and as a result, I have a lot of wonderful interviews from some unbelievably talented people coming soon including…
“Write what scares you” - Ramsey Campbell
“For horror, death isn’t the end of the story” - Grady Hendrix
And many more including Tim Lebbon, Stephen Volk, and Beverley Lee!
Stay tuned and watch this space for more…
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Thank you for reading this month’s issue of The Anatomy Shelf.
If you have anything you would like me to include in the next issue, please DM me on social media, email theanatomyshelf.gmail.com or message me on Substack by Monday 20th June to guarantee its inclusion.
Please also send me your submissions!
If you wish to submit to The Anatomy Shelf, please read the submission guidelines & contact information via the link below:
I am looking for written pieces, reviews, articles, short fiction, images, photography, art, and more, all related to the body in history, literature, and art, so please get in touch!
Please don’t hesitate to contact me about any ideas you may have: theanatomyshelf@gmail.com
For more updates, please visit my social media:
Twitter: @gothicbookworm
Instagram: @gothicbookworm
Best wishes,
Lauren, The Gothic Bookworm