In one of Grimm's fairy tales there's a story about a man who gets turned into a black, fire-breathing poodle. Since he was the bad guy of the story, after he's turned back they have him drawn and quartered.
Grimm's have quite a bit of Body Horror in their stories. Their version of "Little Red Riding Hood" had the woodsman cut the wolf open so that the grandmother could escape, then pack the Wolf's stomach full of rocks and sew it back together — afterwards they kick him in the river when he wants to drink, so he sinks to the bottom to drown.
Also from the Grimm's is "Snow White", though to a lesser degree. The evil stepmother crashes the wedding of Snow White and the prince. Unfortunately for her, everyone there knows all about her murder attempts on Snow White. Therefore, the stepmother is forced to dance in red-hot shoes. As if feet that are burning aren't bad enough, she has to dance until she dies from exhaustion.
"Mother Holle": The evil sister in the "Toads and Diamonds" version ends up being cursed to vomit up toads whenever she speaks. (Although even her good sister's gift of having jewels fall out of her mouth when she talks doesn't sound like much fun, despite the obvious financial benefits.)
Morphing in general is described as pure Body Horror: the body mutates and changes in a random, uncontrollable sequence, in ways that look disgusting and horrifying (one morph involved a character's bones briefly becoming visible before flesh flowed over them. Another had dragonfly eyes suddenly appear on an otherwise normal human head). It isn't painful, but it looks like it should be. Only estreen, or people with a natural "talent" for morphing (like Cassie), can avert the horror aspects and make the process look beautiful.
Also, whenever they morph the extra mass is sent to Zero-Space, a blank void that ships travel in for faster than light speeds. At one point a passing ship pulls the mass with it, causing the Animorphs to "snap" into Zero-Space...one piece at a time. While this wasn't painful either, it was horrifying to witness (and they would have died in seconds from lack of heat and oxygen if Ax hadn't signaled the ship). The Animorphs aren't too interested in hearing about how they rewrote the Andalite science textbooks.
On occasions when the Animorphs start demorphing just as the two-hour time-limit is reached, there's a very real possibility of them being trapped halfway through and being human/animal hybrids forever.
Remnants has a character who has his skin removed and replaced in small squares with a clear substance while his father is forced to watch. Like the morphing above, though, it doesn't hurt the affected person; it just looks ghastly.
JG Ballard, card-carrying futurist that he is, has dabbled in this genre. One of his novels, Crash, was adapted to film by David Cronenberg (see Film).
Ray Bradbury's more macabre short stories use this trope:
"Fever Dream" is the story of a little boy who discovers that every cell in his body is slowly being replaced by... something, but nobody believes him because they think he's just delirious with sickness. The story ends with the boy having been completely replaced by the virus, with the parents none the wiser, and he's now a vector for the disease.
"Skeleton" features a protagonist who develops a strange phobic disgust of his own bones — and whose bones may be objecting to it...
There's a scene of a "garden" in Cities of the Red Night populated by people who have atrophied into plant-like blobs of tissue with tentacle-like roots with only their genitals intact.
Naked Lunch is filled with examples of this, from a lobotomized patient transforming into a giant centipede, a boneless junky who has sexual intercourse with others by enveloping them like a blob, addicts of various Fantastic Drugs who've atrophied into little more than sucking disks for consuming the drug, and most famously, a man whose asshole starts to speak and eventually replaces his mouth and head.
The short story "Gray Matter" (appears in the collection Night Shift) is about a son watching his father slowly turn into a vaguely humanoid fungus creature due to drinking too much tainted beer. The concept might sound a little silly, but the descriptions of his gradual transformation certainly aren't. This story is a homage to Arthur Machen's classic tale "The White Powder", a much more horrific and completely unfunny version of the same phenomenon.
In the short story "I Am the Doorway" (also in Night Shift), aliens inhibit the main character's body, and eyes appear on his fingertips.
The Stand had a little of it. Captain Trips caused the victims to end up with blackened, swollen necks (leading to the nickname 'Tube Neck' in some areas)and lymph glands.
The Tommyknockers had some teeth-losing, skin transparent...ing, genital morphing hideousness. It was inspired by "The Colour Out of Space" (see below), as King is a huge Lovecraft fan.
The Bad Place features a main character who initially teleports involuntarily. However, the more he jumps, the more he loses focus, with parts of his clothes being patchworked and actually ending up in his skin. It's when he finds half a cockroach has been melded into his shoe that the horror goes into overdrive, ruminating on whether parts of the roach have ended up in his brain or organs. And the big finale cranks it up a little more with the hero grabbing the villain and forcing as many teleports as possible, purposefully meshing the two with garbage, roaches and detritus until they're just a huge mutant blob. With roaches sticking out of them.
Yet another two Koontz novels — Fear Nothing and Seize the Night — are based on the premise that a genetic virus screw-up is causing everyone to slowly mix their DNA with various animals. The result is people slowly transforming into human/animal hybrids, sometimes of multiple animals, with an added dash of violent dementia.
Midnight features (among other horrors) people who alter their own bodies to merge with their computers — and try to assimilate others into their networks. At one point one of them is shot in the head. His body dies, but immediately the computer screen starts printing out "Where is the rest of me? Nonononono!"
At the end of "The Thing on the Doorstep", the protagonist's friend appears on the eponymous doorstep with his mind trapped in the decomposing body of his dead wife.
In the story he revised, "Two Black Bottles": A man disintegrates after his soul is released. It's described very graphically.
"Under the Pyramids" (ghostwritten for Harry Houdini), aside from the inevitable Eldritch Abomination, suggests that a corrupt branch of the ancient Egyptian priesthood had made a practice of stitching together patchworks of human and animal corpses, in emulation of their animal-headed gods. Shadows of these mix-and-match mummies are seen moving across the walls, implying either that they're undead, or that the priests had scooped Dr. Frankenstein's breakthrough by millennia and brought their hybrids to life.
This is what the Chaga does to terrestrial life in Ian McDonald's short story "Toward Kilimanjaro" and his novel Evolution's Shore. It's arguably beneficial... usually.
At least two of Kim Newman's works feature this, both written under the Pen Name Jack Yeovil:
Newman has lots of fun with this in Orgy of the Blood Parasites. One character develops organicchainsaws for arms.
Writing Games Workshop, Newman's Dark Future titles had people being transformed into half-human, half-reptile hybrids by shadowy GenTech; complete with bone shifts, skin flaking off to become scales and extra teeth erupting from the jawline. The Demon Download series also featured The Path of Joseph, whose adherents were lucky enough to experience the joys of being slowly mutated into Barbie-esque carbon copies of Donny and Marie Walton. Although the transformation process itself is never directly described, the Waltonites are all identical, plastic-parted clones who spew a mish-mash of sanctimonious prayers and Sears Catalogue advertisements and lack nipples, genitals, and individual toes. They don't bleed, either.
Kent J. Starrett tends to do this in his darker works, usually overlapping with Surreal Horror. Delightful examples include:
"The Secret Game" has dream-demons that can take any shape they want, such as your childhood crush with tenticular limbs or huge-headed caricature monsters like something out of Deranged Animation.
"Human Resources" features an asymmetrical human species from the far future with copper-rich skin that always sheds, gigantic, long-fingered right hands, and bulbous right eyes. Even if they're not wholly malevolent, it's still pretty unnerving.
And the capper, from "Children of Light and Darkness": a cellar full of human children who have been lobotomized, given limb extensions/reductions, subjected to endless skin grafts and otherwise surgically modified by a seemingly loving foster couple.
Fleshgaits, which take the shape of the protagonist's loved ones... and are so fragile that one can pulp them into oblivion with their fists, all while they bleed poisonous black fumes.
Parachildren, biomechanical human children that have exposed metal ribs, teeth, and skull-plates.
This can be found in spades in the works of Sheri S. Tepper:
In Shadow's End, in exchange for humans being permitted to live on the planet Dinadh, when a woman experiences her first pregnancy, she is then gang-raped by a native race called the Kachis. Several Kachis grow in her womb, eating the human foetus for sustenance. When the woman goes into labour, if there isn't a special container to restrain the Kachis when they are born, they will proceed to attack the woman.
In Sideshow, a conjoined-twin brother/sister are attacked by the main villains and are converted in dinka-jins, artificially enhanced bodies (imagine a human body converted in mechanical parts that can detach themselves from the main core and move about independently).
In Gibbon's Decline and Fall the main villain envisions a world where women exist in mindless suspended animation, the only part of their body utilized being the womb in order to create more men for his "perfect reality".
By Title
The Abarat series definitely qualifies, especially with the accompanying illustrations. The worst has to be the Fugit brothers, whose facial features are mounted on insect legs that they use to crawl around.
F. Paul Wilson is fond of this. One particularly horrifying example was what happened to Danny Gordon in The Adversary Cycle.
"The Abnormals" a.k.a. "The Discarded" abounds with this, illustrated vividly in the Stephen Hawking Sci-Fi Masters TV adaptation. A bunch of people are cast off into space on an old spaceship after they were mutated by a virus. There are a couple of fish-men, though they don't appear in the TV episode. The leader, Sanswope, grew an extra head. Another sort-of leader has a hugely oversized hand and arm. There's a woman with porcupine quills and a background character with one eye and a flattened head. There are people with tentacle arms or feet. But the worst one, at least onscreen, is big arm guy's girlfriend, whose torso skin is transparent and allows a view of her organs when she disrobes.
All Tomorrows: All of the post-Qu humans to some degree, but some really stand out.
The humans on one planet were divided into two categories. One was lobotomized genetically but left essentially human. The other was turned into parasites designed to torment their relatives for forty million years!◊. They also ended up forming a symbiotic relationship, though the host species were little more than vehicles for the parasites by the end.
Jonathan Shriek in Shriek: An Afterword allows himself to be infected by a fungus to infiltrate the secret tunnels of the Graycaps. What starts out as bit of mould under his fingernails ends up in a state where he looks like an overweight middle-aged man as long as he concentrates, but if he allows the fungus to emerge, tendrils are involved. And occasionally he'll mention a body part like his ear, and comments that he actually lost it ages ago; it's just fungus mimicking the original form.
The following book, Finch, features Partials, kind of fungus-cyborgs that go through a similar process as Jonathan, but specifically allow a fungus to eat out one of their eyes, and replace it with a spore-based camera.
The Ashtown Burials contains a scene where protagonist Cyrus wakes in the night to find new ally Nolan ripping off his own skin with bare hands and a knife. It turns out that this is a necessary part of his Healing Factor and nothing really worrying (though it does hurt), but the rest of the series has regular descriptions of Nolan peeling his skin away after an injury, or of the skin hanging from his body in tattered shreds when he's too busy to remove it properly.
Astrosaurs features a child-friendly version of this in "The Castle of Frankensaur", with dinosaurs being fused together, dinosaur body parts being turned into vegetables, a monster made of dinosaur parts, and the main villain being revealed to have put his head on another dinosaur's tail to control him.
Czech writer Jaroslav Hasek did this frequently in his satirical short stories. For example, in "The Austrian Customs" a man is composed from scratch after the train wreck, using animal parts and artificial prosthetics. The story's premise is very similar to RoboCop (1987), including a scene where a person visits his own grave (a scene planned for but left out of the movie). The reason for its title? Austrian Customs at the time (1910s) forbade importation of pig meat and the man had an implanted pig liver.
Bazil Broketail: Not the Doom itself (since it has no body of its own), but three slaves who serve as its senses. They are put in tight cages in which they can barely move (or rather, they could if they had any control of their own bodies), horribly deformed, and have various orifices (those the Doom does not need) sewn shut.
The psychic children in Bitter Seeds have to carry big batteries around in order to fuel their powers. The batteries are plugged into their brains. The warlocks opposing them, on the other hand, have to shed more and more blood every time they summon. First, it's just a few drops. Then a fingertip. Then an arm. Then...
Many examples in The Book of Lost Things abound but the Huntress' "creations" and the Crooked Man's body falling apart come to mind.
Clive Barker's Books of Blood collection: "The Body Politic" has a set of hands — followed by all other hands — attaining sentience and deciding they want "autonomy." "Jacqueline Ess — Her Will and Testament" features a housewife who survives a suicide attempt and gains the ability to warp flesh, using her ability to grant men a terminal and ecstatic sexual experience.
In The Braided Path, The Weavers' True Masks give their wearers great power while simultaneously taking everything from them, both mentally and physically. The longer a Weaver wears a Mask, the more grotesque and diseased he becomes, to the point where Vyrrch is basically melted and flabby on one side of his face, while the other is missing most of its skin, revealing parts of the skull underneath. The book's description is much, much more disgusting than this.
In The Changeover, 'Sorry' Carlisle claims he felt the protagonist Laura's skull shifting when she underwent the titular changeover.
Many versions of the "Cinderella" story inflict Body Horror on the cruel sisters/stepsisters. They hack off parts of their feet trying to get the glass slipper to fit. In the Grimm's version, their eyes are pecked out by birds. In some Spanish-American tellings, they grow horns and donkey ears. In one version the selfish sister has snakes come out of her mouth whenever she tries to speak.
In The City of Dreaming Books, the Shadow King is turned from a young aspiring human author into a creature made entirely of paper which combusts when it encounters light. We are also treated to the full process of how it happened — which included being boiled alive, dismembered and watching bits and pieces of yourself float about in tanks around you.
Dr. Krok from "Comrade Death" accidentally came into contact with a single, trivially small drop of the new poison he created. His body was bloated and deformed until he resembled a hippopotamus in the shape of a man, with bulging red eyes, his nose having been swallowed by his monstrous face, and no teeth. Had the drop been larger his body would have dissolved into liquid.
Coraline: Other Father was turned into a grotesquely misshapen and blind creature, left to crawl around the basement, while Other Spink and Forcible's fates were similar, only they were trapped inside a cocoon. And let's not talk about what happens to them in the movie...
The Dawnhounds features an engineered plague that repurposes organic material to create hybrid organisms to help spread itself better.
[...] a dog with a man’s face, crying out in pain. Its mouth remade into a snout like a dog’s, but puckered pink human flesh. It tried to bite him until he walloped it with the cane and send it running off down into the rats-nest of alleyways, shrieking in the voice of a child. Sen moved on.
Many Fairy Tale stories like "The Death of Koschei the Deathless" actually involve characters having their heads cut off or their bodies torn apart, and somehow they come back to life after their bits and pieces are sewn back together. Russian tales manage to soften it by specifying that a magic liquid (usually water from the river Jordan) is used to seamlessly put the pieces together and basically make the body as if it died of natural causes, before bringing it back to life. It also works only once to get back from the dead that way so the character has to be extra careful not to die again.
The Diamond Guardian's vicious and scary pets are biologically attached to him.
Almost happen to Lief if his companions didn't take off the mask given to him by the Masked One's chief.
At the end of Descent into the Depths of the Earth, Escalla corners her sister after she's revealed to have been behind a plot to free an ancient and insane god from prison involving a ritual that requires mass human sacrifice, and incidentally have Escalla put to death. Escalla uses three medium-power spells to exact hideous vengeance: Flesh to Stone, Stone to Mud, and finally Dispel Magic. She's taken to prison in a bucket.
Just because I'm a little blonde Faerie I have to be nice?
The Devil's Alphabet by Daryl Gregory. Most of a town's inhabitants are struck by a strange plague that mutates them rapidly. Aggros become about 9 feet tall with grayish skin, aggressive tendencies, and no body hair. The protagonist's mother was one of many who didn't survive the transition, and she, like many others, experienced intense pain and ended up with bone jutting out of her limbs because the bone growth was so rapid that the muscles and skin couldn't keep up. The plague shifted and the next group were the sealskinned Betas, all female save for a single male baby born at the end. The third group, including the main character's father, became grotesquely obese Charlies. They don't smell too good and they develop large, rapid-growing, fluid-filled pustules that are drained by Charlie boys so they can get high off the liquid inside. The protagonist is horrified watching one of the blisters grow before his eyes.
In Discworld, Angua's breed of werewolf can look like either a normal human or a normal wolf, but the few seconds of transition between the two is so horrific that she never lets anyone see it if she can help it. (This being a novel series, we have to Take Their Word For It, and we're glad to do so.)
There's also the thankfully brief description of Cosmo Lavish's hand, which has become rotten and gangrenous from wearing a too-small signet ring near the end of Making Money.
The Divine Comedy: Several levels of Hell involve grisly torments and Purgatory involves a few equally brutal penances:
People who committed suicide are turned into trees that are broken by harpies and demon hounds and can only speak when bleeding.
Fortune tellers have their heads turned around backwards, which causes them immense pain to the point where they cry until they are completely blind.
Thieves are constantly attacked by snakes. Some thieves turn into snakes when bitten and can only regain their human form by attacking others. Dante describes these grotesque transformations in detail.
The schismatics are cut apart by a demon with a sword, then all their body parts assemble back together in time for the demon to cut them up again, Specifically, Muhammad is split in half down the middle with all his organs hanging out. And Dante still has a conversation with him.
The penance for Envy in Purgatory; people who committed the sin have their eyes sewn shut with wires. The idea is that they committed envy through their sight and so, to purge them of their sin, they see nothing.
Stephen Monaghan, hero of The Dollmaker, has his blood turned into something either like breast milk or semen, depending on how squicked you want to be.
Doom Valley Prep School: For a comedy there is quite a lot of body horror. Early on two students, a boy and a girl are shown to be connected by their arm and leg. A month later the pair are basically two nearly identical heads on one body. A girl was turned into a mouse girl that the canteen cat women look at with hungry eyes and sharp knives. The Monster Under The Bed would classify as a body horror with her very inhuman body, but she's so nice people tend to ignore the two sets of eyes, lipless mouth, fangs, trunk, multi-jointed arms, and ten bone like fingers on each hand. And Petra transformed herself a little too often and began transforming at random due to Random Transformation Syndrome, before getting stabilized, one leg was longer than the other, she had one cat ear, male genetalia, and more.
Downward to the Earth: Jeff Kurtz has become hideously deformed as a result of his failed rebirth ceremony. When Gundersen finds him, he is completely hairless, with flabby, drooping lips over a toothless mouth, enlarged cheekbones, a pendulous nose, stunted limbs and an extended spine, fused toes, and multiple-jointed, spider-like hands mindlessly clenching and unclenching.
R. A. Lafferty's "Dream" is a nice Christmasy story where everyone suddenly starts to dream that they are hideous ogres, crawled over by bugs the whole time, whose digestive system consists of rats that run in and out of their mouths to bring food into their stomachs. But there's an uplifting ending: humanity realizes that their own fate is in their hands, and all they have to do to stop the hideous dreams is to decide, once and for all, that they want to wake up in the real world.
The mad dream disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. The world came back to normal with an embarrassed laugh. It was all over. It had lasted from its inception six weeks. The mad dream that vanished, however, is the dream that people weren't hideous ogres...
Earth and...: Jarra's classmate Desi shows the class her Art project, depicting the horrific effects of radiation used in previous centuries. The images give some people nightmares, and that's before they find themselves in a Contamination Situation.
Eden Green follows a rationalist main character trying to study an alien needle symbiote that has infected her best friend, and all the limb-severing, head-destroying problems that entail.
The Edge Chronicles: The final book of the series, "The Immortals", introduces a condition known as "Phraxtouch". Miners mining Stormphrax (a rare material that can purify the filthiest water) end up inhaling tiny fragments of it, and over time it builds up and slowly purifies their blood into water, killing them. A tell-tale sign of someone who's been phraxtouched is a vapor that is constantly exhaled from the mouth.
During the Third Age, crawlers are creatures who were originally human woman but were so experimented upon that they became ferocious monsters. All of them still retain some human-like features. During the Second Age, they were ice dragons that were also experimented upon so they could use magic.
After coming across a severely wounded villager, Rielle tries to heal his burns. Not only does it not work, the flesh she tries to regrow ends up enveloping her hands. By the time Audric snaps her out of her trance, the villager she tried to heal is just a large puddle of blood and guts.
David Tirado in Everyman slowly turns into a huge colony organism of the doppelganger's victims. Tons of juicy body horror ensues.
The Expanse has damn near anything that the Protomolecule does to its victims. During the initial stages of infection, it turns people into "Vomit Zombies" that puke more Protomolecule so it can spread itself. After the initial stage, it'll start rendering people down into their constituent parts and repurposing the biomass for whatever it needs. That's to say nothing of the fact that the people are still alive and conscious throughout all of this, some of them stuck perpetually experiencing things like their flesh falling off their body. This isn't intentional, it just wasn't designed to work with complex life.
Galactic Milieu: In Jack the Bodiless, the titular Jack starts to experience his terrible mutation at the age of two, as intractable cancers destroy his body. Genetic engineering helps at first, but in the end, nothing can stop the transformation. Various scenes over the course of months point out the effects of the cancers, culminating with nothing left but his eyeless, skinless head. And then, in a moment of desperation, he completes what turns out to be an evolution, leaving behind his dying body to become an independent disembodied brain. It's implied that if the doctors had left well enough alone, his transformation would have happened a lot quicker with less mess.
Gone has too many to list without it becoming a folder on its own, but here are just a few examples of the less disturbing metamorphoses:
Once Mary Terrafino and Francis emerge on the "Other side" they are mangled, have lost their mouths and eyes, and are apparently "too disgusting" to describe in detail. The person who found Mary called animal control first because he thought she was a dead bear!
In "Plague" both Dekka and Hunter have bugs hatch out of their bodies and feed on them, crippling them both. For Dekka, temporarily.
Also from Plague Brittney/Drake being cut in three by Brianna. Brittney/Drake goes through a lot, starting right when they got to claw their way out of a grave.
E.Z getting eaten alive from the inside out by mutated killer worms in Hunger.
In Fear, Cigar is left at Penny's mercy from sunrise to sunset, and she, among other brutalities, makes him claw his own eyes out.
The "Stuff" that fills The Gone-Away World typically turns into whatever someone's thinking of. If it gets on someone, it can turn them into whatever they're thinking of. Unfortunately, their internal anatomy is also matched to whatever they're imagining, so if they don't have detailed knowledge of the organs of whatever they're thinking of, odds are they're not going to survive the experience.
In Great Ship, the Remoras — a Human Subspecies — are constantly bombarded by interstellar radiation due to them living on the outer hull of the Great Ship, which causes rampant mutation. However, they deliberately cultivate their mutations through use of technology into forums they consider useful, or beautiful. One Remora character is described as having no eyes but instead having glowing hairs poking out of where their eyes should be.
In Half World, people go to the titular purgatory when they die. Aside from the fact that people appear in Half World in the state that they died in, many of them have been trapped in purgatory for so long that the transformative nature of Half World caused its denizens to turn into terrible Mix-and-Match Critters.
In Hallow Mass, Chester Sawyer and his . . . abnormal appendages are the most prominent example, but victims of various malicious formula also fit the bill.
They did the same thing to his friend, at least in the film, which he gets to watch in horror.
The climax of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone treats us to the wonderful image of Voldemort's face protruding from the back of Professor Quirrell's head.
Ron vomits up live slugs after his attempt to curse Draco Malfoy for insulting Hermione backfires from his broken wand.
After Harry's arm is broken by the rogue Bludger sent after him by Dobby, Lockhart tries to heal him, but instead of mending the bones, he vanishes them, leaving Harry with little more than a tentacle with fingers at the end. And then Harry has to regrow the bones in his arms by taking Skele-Gro; Harry compares the healing process to having a million splinters lodged in his arm.
During a Transfiguration lesson, the students are supposed to turn animals into water goblets with a "Ferreverto" spell. When Ron tries it on Scabbers, the rat turns into a goblet...that's squeaking, furry, and has a tail. Scabbers is actually Peter Pettigrew in his Animagus form. It's even possible that the spell didn't work for Ron because he was trying to do it on an Animagus.
One Cut Song details Nearly Headless Nick's Family-Unfriendly Death: forty-five axe blows to the neck and his head still stayed attached by a half-inch of skin!
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban has Remus Lupin's transformation into a werewolf. Also, the stories of his transformations as a child coupled with the bloodstains and destruction in the Shrieking Shack are pretty disturbing, especially since he has to go through a similar process every single month.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire has Voldemort's resurrection via a ritual requiring Harry's blood and Wormtail's entire hand. What's more, before this ritual, Voldemort had been inhabiting a rudimentary artificial body resembling a deformed foetus.
In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, we meet poor old Bathilda Bagshot, who has already been dead for quite some time, with Voldemort using her reanimated corpse as a disguise for his snake Nagini.
The Polyjuice Potion temporarily transforms the user's body to look like someone else. We first see it in action in Chamber of Secrets, with lovely descriptions of Harry's insides "writhing as though he'd just swallowed live snakes," followed by his skin melting and bubbling as it transforms. Hermione accidentally ingests cat hairs in her potion and ends up stuck in a half-feline state. Later, in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the man we thought wasMad-Eye Moody reverts to his true form as Barty Crouch Jr. when the potion wears off. Moody's wooden leg and magical glass eye pop out of the transforming body as Crouch's real leg and eye grow back in.
"Splinching" is what happens when people attempt to Apparate and accidentally leave parts of their bodies behind. It's Played for Laughs at first...until Deathly Hallows, when Ron leaves behind a good-sized chunk of his arm, and nearly bleeds to death.
Tracker Jacker venom, aside from being a horrifically potent hallucinogenic, leaves the stung area so bloated that just a few can make the victim look completely deformed.
The Capitol's lovely tradition of cutting off the tongues of the prisoners that they later condemn to a lifetime of slavery.
And their penchant for public floggings, which can get so extreme strips of the person's flesh would be flying through the air.
The entire situation with Peeta's leg in the first book. A deep slashing cut with a sword, then Peeta is unable to move for days partly because he has taken a few Tracker Jacker stings on top of the injury, an infection that can only be dealt with with futuristic super-medicine, and just when it looks like it's getting better the poor guy is forced to run so hard the wound opens up again and he almost bleeds to death, the only thing keeping him alive being Katniss's makeshift tourniquet.
Johanna literally carving the tracking device out of Katniss's arm would also qualify.
Hurog: In Dragon Bones, Oreg recounts how he was turned into castle Hurog. While the process seems to have been painless, happening while Oreg was asleep, one cannot begin to imagine how it feels to suddenly be a sentient building. He reports that he can feel it if the building is damaged. (He has a human body, too, but that doesn't seem to be a real body in the usual sense of the word, as it can only be killed by Oreg's owner, and is otherwise immortal.)
The Hyperion Cantos series features the cruciforms, parasites that bond to a person's chest and create a network of tendrils that become coextensive with the host's nervous system. The cruciform will resurrect the host every time the host dies, but with each resurrection, the host's genetic code degrades slightly, to the point where the host becomes deformed and severely mentally disabled. They also confine the host to a relatively small geographic area by inflicting excruciating pain whenever the host tries to travel too far from the cave where the parasites are incubated.
In "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream", the horrific supercomputer AM captures five humans to torture for its own pleasure, and chooses to torture one by mutating his (formerly handsome) body into an ape-thing beyond recognition, complete with dulled mental capacities. It also inflicts Forced Transformations on the other captives, as well as the one that leads to the title, and the trope it inspires.
Infected and Contagious each involve bio-machines from outer space that use humans as hosts to grow... until they are mature enough to tear their way out.
The plot of The Island of Doctor Moreau, in which animals are surgically altered in rather horrific ways to make them more like humans.
In "It's a Good Life", little Anthony (a Creepy Child of the first order) transforms obstreperous party guest Dan Hollis into... something-or-other unspeakably horrific, then wishes him "into the cornfield."
Johannes Cabal the Necromancer has Dennis and Denzil as their bodies decay and the titular necromancer attempts to keep them looking less terrifying than everything else at his demonic carnival.
Journey to Chaos: Mana mutation provides many examples of this trope because it involves fundamental changes in someone's biology. They could grow new limbs or orifices, lose them, or become a radically different shape altogether. Parts of the victim's body could gain a life of their own and attack them.
In the Kane Series's "Lynortis Reprise", survivors of the battle of Lynortis are known as "half-men". They are heavily mutilated, lacking limbs, burnt — and some of them sport prosthetics, like Crawler, who substituted his missing jaw with steel fangs.
Kingdom on Fire: The familiars of the Ancients are all humans who were horrifically deformed in some way, shape, or form and made into servants for the Ancients.
On-Tez's Familiars are human-bird hybrids known as "Ravens".
R'hlem's Familiars are humans who've been Flayed Alive.
Nemneris' Familiars are giant human-spider hybrids known as "Lice" (or "Louse" for the singular pronunciation).
Molochoron's Familiars are humans with melted faces and arms and hands covered in boils.
In "The Last Step" by Zenna Henderson, alien invaders are shooting people with dart guns. They seem to do no more than prick you, but wherever you are pricked swells to the size of an orange and hurts. It can be relieved by cutting it open, but this has to be done with extreme caution, because what's inside are a lot of tiny aliens who jump out and scramble away, their feet pricking your skin in the process. And then those pricked places...
During the first book in the Legacy of the Drow Series, Dinin Do'Urden adamantly refuses his sister Vierna's order for him to be part of a mission to capture their brother, the Defector from DecadenceDrizzt Do'Urden. Because he's fought the guy once, and he's scared of him. Vierna's response? She turns him into a drider, a bloated half-drow/half-spider hybrid.
The main protagonist from Machine Man. First he loses his right leg in an industrial accident and builds a better prosthetic replacement. When he realizes he's done a better job than evolution, he returns for a matching set. That is truly only the beginning.
Elder God K'rul from the Malazan Book of the Fallen and The Kharkanas Trilogy crafted the currently used form of magic with his blood and these Paths of Magic, known as the Warrens, are described as running through his veins. So when the Warrens are poisoned in Memories of Ice, opening them occasionally causes boatloads of blood to come pouring out.
Pure-blooded trolls in Malediction Trilogy are often horribly disfigured due to 500 years of excessive inbreeding. Their king is morbidly obese, their queen is conjoined with her twin sister, while one of the characters, comte Marc, has a face that looks as if it was split in half. There are also trolls with two heads, trolls with shrunken limbs, and ones that would be unable to move if not for their magic.
Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future: The Tics and the Engineered Food Creatures are the two most notable culprits, though pretty much all of the species in the book have some degree of body horror.
The Tics resemble tumorous masses of gristly flesh with human faces peering out of their folds and random assortments of arms and legs sprouting out of them.
The Engineered Food Creatures are misshapen hulks of meat and fat, barely even able to move, with wizened, atrophied limbs and distorted human faces.
The Changing a.k.a. the effects of the Griever sting from The Maze Runner. Greenish black veins all over your body, bloodshot eyes, blackened lips and gums, along with a distorted voice and general pain so great it makes you pass out.
The Metamorphosis: Average Guy wakes up as an unknown human-sized insect, unable to perform many of the actions natural for human. It gets even worse when his father throws some apples at him in anger and the second one penetrates his carapace and sticks, rotting and eventually causing his death.
The Midnight Library has this sparingly, but the few examples are consistently horrifying.
"Shut Your Mouth" involves a group of rowdy teenage girls stealing so-called "special candy" from an eccentric, meek old shopkeeper. The shopkeeper gets the last laugh when the candy causes their lips to meld together and vanish with their mouths. The process is described as an awful, tingling sensation.
Liam, the protagonist of "Blind Witness", loses his vision to a chemical accident and gets an eye transplant... from a dead man. His new eyes force Liam to relive the man's terrified last moments in his dreams until he experiences being murdered as the man did. The real gut punch? The man's killer was Liam's father. Both physically and emotionally horrible.
"I Can See You" has Farmer Axby, the ghost of a bitter farmer who burned to death. Not only is Axby's flesh charred black over all his bones, but his mere touch can swiftly dissolve anyone into a pile of ash.
By far the most extreme example is "An Apple a Day", in which Tim Barrett steals and eats an apple from nasty Old Bill Cole's orchard. Cue graphic descriptions of the boy's body taking on plant-like features, like leaves shooting from his ears and apples growing under his skin, until roots shoot from his feet and bark covers his body, turning him into a new tree for the evil old Cole's orchard. The entire orchard is composed of such victims, their terrified faces still etched into the bark.
In Minecraft: The Island, early on the protagonist is horrified at their square body, especially the fingerless hands.
Mistborn: The Original Trilogy includes some of this; the process of Hemalurgy, specifically, involves killing a person in order to transfer his or her powers (and/or soul) to another person by piercing them with a piece of metal, usually a large spike. The Lord Ruler uses this to create his Steel Inquisitors, which have gigantic metal spikes shoved into their eyes, among other places; Koloss, who the Hemalurgy mutates into monstrous, inhuman war machines whose skin is replaced by that of a different Koloss and which never grows larger (thus a newly-created Koloss will have baggy skin that would fall off if it weren't fastened on with spikes, and the oldest and largest Koloss have skin that has stretched so far that it's torn off of them); and kandra, shapeshifters which absorb the bones of dead creatures to support their bodies, which otherwise are just blobs of flesh.
Jean-Paul Sartre's existential novel Nausea gruesomely delves into imaginary body horror when the protagonist narrates his daydream of what might happen if reality suddenly began to defy people's expectations of it. A bloody lump of half-rotted meat dragging itself across the street, a child's cheek splitting open to reveal scattered eyes growing out of his face, and people waking up to find their tongues partly changed into wriggling centipedes are just the beginning of his imagined apocalypse. Even then, he realizes people would still find a way to categorize the world around them, coming up with new names and meanings for these horrors like "stone-eye, great three-cornered arm, toe-crutch, spider-jaw."
The natural creation of Whampyri is pure body horror. A Whampyri is a result of a human being infected by a parasitic leech, which changes their body structure and heightens their lust and power over remorse. To create offspring, the vampire leeches of the Wamphyri create a single egg, which is then put into a potential host, called an egg son or egg daughter. The egg children usually lose consciousness during the transformation due to the pain of the egg merging with their bodies. Should a Whampyri die, the leech will try to abandon its host and search for a new one. An exception to the single egg-laying Whampyri, are the "mothers" whom all Whamypri fear due to their ability to lay countless leech eggs (but not before being drained into a lifeless husk).
The Vampire World trilogy, set in the same universe, has the Wamphyri modify creatures into warbeasts to suit their needs. One Wamphyri died and made the Necroscope call him back in exchange for the power to kill by sight; the Wamphyri in question had figured out how to assimilate people and meld them into part of his body, which he proceeded to do to a Wamphyri upon his return from death. He'd become most of the inside of the building the vampire had run to hide in.
The Neverending Story: Ever wonder what it would feel like to lose a part of your body, even half your face or a whole limb, and not die or even feel pain? The Nothing would be happy to show you.
Nineteen Eighty-Four features this briefly when O'Brien criticizes Winston after several weeks of intense torture. To do this, he shows Winston his reflection in a mirror, revealing him to look barely alive and profoundly dehumanized. To demonstrate the extent of his physical decay, O'Brien rips out some of his hair and removes a tooth with uncomfortable ease.
In The Obsidian Chronicles, dragon venom that is ingested or absorbed into the bloodstream of humans grants them immortality while stealing many of their emotions and ability to reproduce. However, a final price is revealed in the first book when it turns out that the venom is in fact slowly transforming the human's heart. When the incubation is complete, the heart undergoes a sudden metamorphosis and an infant dragon tears its way out of the human host in a spray of gore.
Splat mutilates his first Hollow, Walter Banich, into a mess of wounds with his face stitched up with metal wire. Naomi rips the metal wire out when he attacks her, and Ryn pummels him into a full-body cast.
Mr. Saxby stitches together multiple people into a magically animated flesh golem to fight Ryn. It's quite horrific, especially for the people whose parts he used.
The Orthogonal trilogy uses this several times, occasionally without even using any visual cues.
In The Clockwork Rocket, Yalda is sent to jail, where she is "shackled" by use of a resin that causes two of her limbs to be melded together, creating a loop that can be chained to a wall. This is described as a highly disturbing experience — especially since they have to cut through the melded flesh to release her.
One experiment by the biologists involves recording the light signals used by the brain to induce muscle movement and playing it back into the body to try and trigger the movements artificially. It doesn't quite work as planned, and the resulting uncontrollable hand spasms terrify the subject so badly that he tells his associates to cut off the hand. The effect is slightly lessened by remembering that he is a ShapeshiftingStarfish Alien who can reabsorb the damaged flesh to heal the wound, but his brief Inner Monologue during the muscle spasms makes it clear that this is his reaction.
During the biologists' experiments on the arborines, Carlo views the surgical implements as pretty Squicky and inhumane.
Many characters have this reaction to the idea of any kind of deliberate interference with natural childbirth, but especially childbirth that allows the mother to survive.
Parasite Eve: Kiyomi's Mitochondria eventually control her, while her mind is still active. Her husband has the brilliant idea to keep her mitochondria alive (to be fair, he didn't know they were evil) and they end up possessing people, setting people on fire, and turning into what is described as Kiyomi, sans skin and with the ability to reform herself. And to top it all off, Eve rapes Toshiaki and impregnates a young girl with the "baby" and the young girl goes through nine months of Pregnancy in what can't be more than a half an hour made worse by the novel taking time to explain concepts behind the science and Mitochondria really do have their own DNA.
"I am tired here in the dark and I am full of pus."
Mr. Motley is made of this trope.
The Remade, criminals who are punished by having their bodies altered in horrific ways. There's also a Remade brothel.
Pharmakembru: The Face features a kid protagonist finding strange wrinkles on their stomach. Throughout the beginning, there's descriptions of the wrinkles with bumps and veins, feeling itchy, stiff, and sore. By the next year, it turns into a face, which the kid needs to feed and care for, for the rest of their life.
The Matter Manipulator, resident Mad Artist, uses this as a form of torture against disobedient employees:
Without speaking Winston lifted his shirt, and Jamie had to hold back a scream. A burst of glowing light poured out like blood, and it looked as though the middle of his chest had been dug out and replaced with hot coals. The skin around it was smoking and blackened; there was a smell of cooking meat...
Another of the Matter Manipulator's subjects is Tallow of the Freakshow, so named for the fact that his flesh is constantly melting like candlewax, and every so often, he has to reabsorb the pieces back into himself. The sign beneath his tank reads "This is Tallow: his every living movement is hellish," and how true.
The main character in A Planet Called Treason, Lanik Mueller, is a radical regenerative who grows extra genitalia, arms, heads, everything. He winds up growing a clone of himself and freaks out. Lanik is a member of a nation that has been genetically modified to heal quickly from virtually all wounds, and even regrow limbs. During puberty, it is common for them to grow extra body parts, which are subsequently removed. Occasionally, a mutation occurs in which the extra body parts, as well as many additional ones, continue to regrow, resulting in monstrosities (at one point the protagonist has at least five legs, four arms (and probably more), four ears, two noses, three sets of genitalia, and two hearts).
In the Cordwainer Smith story "A Planet Named Shayol", criminals are exiled to a prison planet inhabited by an alien parasite that keeps the prisoners alive but causes their bodies to grow extra parts — which the planet's single guard harvests when he visits the prisoners and sends off-world to be used in organ transplants.
The Power of Five: Diego Salamanda was forcibly mutilated as a baby. His head was put between two planks and forced to grow up. By adulthood, his head was nearly twice as long as the average man and his face is equally deformed.
Pure by Julianna Baggot. Imagine a nuclear sort of blast that fuses you to whatever you were touching when it happened. The protagonist had a doll's head fused to her hand. Her dad had a fan fused to his neck. Some people had animals or other people fused to them. Mothers were fused to children. A guy had a dog fused to his leg and another had birds stuck to his back. Sometimes even whole groups of people were fused together, known as 'groupies'. And some melded with the dust, hence their name 'Dusts'.
While it is all over the place in Quantum Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner, the most iconic example is whoever dies or is overcome by hunger will slowly melt into a black sludge, often deforming and screaming while it happens to them.
In the Ravenloft novel Death of a Darklord, a wizard tries to use magic to heal people, but one of her patients grows scales over his wounds, another has a miniature conjoined twin growing out of his neck, and another has a tentacle for an arm.
Red Moon Rising (Moore) provides ample description of the Change that happens to werewulves during the full moon, which is so bad that it can permanently disfigure them. The bones break and rearrange, the face splits open to handle the widening jaw, and the skull has to break and reform for the muzzle. Once a wulf changes back they often have scars and injuries on their faces, leading to the derogatory term "crumple-skull". Oh, and elementary school kids are required to watch an educational video of this happening to a wulf as part of their school curriculum!
The eponymous factory in The Red Tower originally manufactured abstract kitsch, but soon began experimenting with adding incongruous and unsettling organic features (such as a pocketwatch with insects for numbers and lizard tongues for hands). Eventually these products evolved into its line of hyper-organisms. The Tower itself is often described in terms comparing it to a cyst or a spreading growth, struggling against the immune system of the surrounding wastes.
In Restoree, Restorees are sheer Body Horror to the people of Lothar because of the disgustingly livid skin, the very obvious grafting scars at wrists and ankles, and most of all because of the victims' drooling insanity. Improved medical techniques have cured all those problems but the mindless revulsion remains.
The Melding Plague is harmless if you're a baseline human, but if you have any advanced technology (nanomachines) in you, it will infect those and cause them to rapidly fail and go out of control. In Chasm City, a character mentions that if you have those implants in your head, your head will explode. And it can infect advanced buildings and vehicles as well. In Chasm City, inhabitants of high-tech buildings were trapped in the walls, visibly screaming in terror. The survivors of the disaster don't know if it's possible to revive them.
Also from the Revelation Space universe — Nightingale, a quite insane medical AI that creates artistic statements against war using living human beings as its medium.
"Diamond Dogs" has the main character being slowly and voluntarily turned from a human into a cybernetic dog-like creature. Unfortunately, the doctor who did this took himself apart so he wouldn't have to undo his "greatest work".
The Big Bad takes possession of its hosts, then turns their face into a lookalike of Mister Punch with the giant hooked nose and chin shattering the jaw and shredding the skin. Then when it is finished with its host, their face falls off. Oh, and they are still alive at the time it happens.
In the sequel Moon Over Soho, the Black Magici...sorry, Ethically Challenged Magician keeps a severed head alive, conscious and enslaved for over four decades, plus has a sideline in creating real Cat Girls by fusing people and with actual cats. There is worse, but Nightingale tells viewpoint character Peter Grant that he doesn't want to know and Grant decides to accept this since the clean-up crew has to involve people who excavate war graves in Rwanda and Kosovo.
In Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures, there's a whole army of "Copper Killers" — soldiers who died in battle and were then, with the help of alchemy, clockwork, and science, reanimated as immortal hybrids of flesh and technology.
The main characters in Scorpion Shards are subject to some gross disfigurements by the Eldritch Abomination parasites that infect them. In particular, Tory develops an extreme case of painful and disgusting acne, and Lourdes gains so much weight that paper airplanes curve around her gravitational field.
The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System: Ren Zha Fanpai Zijiu Xitong: Ties That Bind is a demonic plant that's attracted to living beings and spiritual energy, its seeds embedding itself in flesh before bursting through the skin as it sprouts. It doesn't help that the only way to get rid of it is to burn it off with hot coal four times a day, which is another unpleasant experience in of itself.
In Yann Martel's Self, after being raped, the trauma of the event causes Yann's body to revert back from female to male. As if the detail used wasn't creepy enough, Yann is pregnant, and the fetus now has to find somewhere else to exist inside Yann.
The Shahnameh: The devil disguised as a young cook, asks Zahhak permission to kiss him on the shoulders and when Zahhak grants the request, the disguised devil vanishes and from Zahhak's shoulders grow two hideous snakes! They try cutting the snakes off but they just grow back and would only leave Zahhak alone if they are fed the brain of young men! Eventually when Fereydoon defeats Zahhak, he decides the most fitting punishment for Zahhak is to lock him up in a cave in mount Damavand and let the snakes do the rest!
In Shaman Blues, this is apparently what the Old Ones want to induce on shamans they "initiate". Not much is mentioned, but it apparently includes boiling, Auto Cannibalism, and divining future from one's own bones.
In the Shira Calpurnia novel Legacy, a character is given drugs and gene implants to try to turn him into a fake heir to a Rogue Trader to try to steal his charter of trade from the rightful heir. Said treatment never completely takes and mutates and distorts his body into something that looks like concept art from The Thing (1982) before he dies.
The disease greyscale. It causes the flesh to calcify and crack, followed by insanity and eventually death. Stannis's daughter Shireen had a mild case (it affects children less severely), but part of her face is still gray and cracked even after she was cured. Jon Connington won't be so lucky.
The punishment for a whore caught infecting Tarly men is to have her privates washed in lye (sodium hydroxide). For the record, this is what lye does to a hand◊.
In this context, lye doesn't actually refer to sodium hydroxide, but rather to lye soap, so what Tarly really meant was to have the whore's privates washed out with soap. Granted, washing with lye soap is still pretty harsh on your skin, but it beats getting burned by actual lye.
The way Vargo Hoat dies in A Feast for Crows. The Blood Knight Gregor Clegane (aka the Mountain) chops off his limbs, roasts them, and uses them to feed his prisoners, including Hoat himself, who's already delirious from his injuries and infections.
Sometimes, due to the Valyrians' affinity with dragons, stillborn or miscarried fetuses carried by Targaryen women or the wives of Targaryen men (as an aside, the two categories overlap more often than not) will have developed dragon-like features, including scaly skin and tiny wings. Historical examples in the Backstory include all of Maegor the Cruel's children (though that may have been the fault of one of his wives poisoning the others) and Rhaenyra Targaryen's stillborn daughter. A more recent example from the main books is Daenerys's stillborn son Rhaego.
Sonic the Hedgehog Adventure Gamebooks: The second book Zone Rangers, has Galen and Number One - sides from a Insider group - get mutated and transformed by the Chaos Emerald's power (which provides the page image). The two return to normal after Sonic's able to get the Chaos Emeralds to cool down.
The Southern Reach Trilogy: Expedition members are warned to avoid contamination by Area X as it's not known what happened to those who did not return. Though most became part of Area X by turning into animals, some turned into grotesque monsters that are neither animal nor human. The psychologist of the last 11th expedition became the moaning creature, a monster with patchy white skin, too many extremities, a human face, and a bone-slicing moan it cannot contain come evening.
In Space Glass, Polodium Sickness covers your body with green zigzagging lines, all the while paralyzing, blinding, and potentially killing you.
The Spirit Thief: Demonseeds who manifest into demons undergo some gross physical changes, including charring of skin, inhuman contortion of limbs, sprouting claws and fangs, and other, similar pleasantries.
Sith "alchemy" can border on this at times. Luke's clones in Dark Empire are a lot taller and more muscular (and dumber) than him. Luke's soul is actually severed from his body in the Jedi Academy Trilogy.
Galaxy of Fear, being inspired by Goosebumps, has this now and then. The Planet Plague features The Virus which turns people into Blob Monsters in a rather disgusting way. Thirteen-year-old Tash is injected with some and throughout the book feels irritable and angry as a rash-covered lump on her arm grows and swells until it splits and starts oozing virus-laden slime that fights her movements.
First, we have the Embrace of Pain. In fact, the Yuuzhan Vong in general are big on pain. It's not uncommon to see a Vong with dozens of piercings, some of them connected to other piercings by a too-short chain.
High-ranking Vong are fond of surgically removing parts of their own bodies and attaching parts from other creatures in their place. This, coupled with the ritual scarrings and piercings mentioned above, are particularly common among the priest and warrior castes (since all of this Body Horror is an act of worship towards the Vong gods, and those two castes are known for excessive displays of devotion); members of the shaper caste prefer to avoid this in favor of more subtle alterations to their internal organs.
Dengar's backstory is that, after a crashed speeder, he was "fixed" by having the parts of his brain which showed emotions being slowly removed, leaving him a robot with no ability to care, no emotions beyond anger, hope, and (accidentally) loneliness. This was intentional: the people who "fixed" him wanted him to be made into an assassin with the hope that if he did well enough they would restore his other emotions.
Most of Boba Fett's skin was slowly burnt away by acid. Admittedly they don't show this happening, just the aftereffect, but the implication is fairly horrendous.
The Stone Dance of the Chameleon runs on this trope. The Masters are completely obsessed with ritual mutilation. If common people see a Master unmasked, the least horrible punishment is being blinded. There's a caste of people who have one eye plucked out at birth. Likewise, pregnant women are sometimes administered a poison that makes them more likely to give birth to Conjoined Twins, one of which is always blinded at birth. Then there's a different people, the Marula, whose oracles commune with their god by having maggots burrow through their own flesh. Most grotesque of all, however, are the Wise, a political faction of the Masters. These people are stripped of all their senses except touch — eyes, nose, and tongue, and eardrums are cut out. They are also castrated and communicate with the outer world through a homunculus, a personal slave whose growth has been deliberately stunted. By pressing the homunculus' throat in a certain way, they can relay what they want to see through the homunculus, who will speak for them.
Soulcaster fabrials allow people to turn anything into anything else. Common uses are turning stone to food, or carved wood into stone to make details easier. However, over time the people who use the fabrials begin to... change. The exact character of change depends on the kind of Soulcaster they use. Those that turn things into stone are described like living statues, with marble-like skin and eyes that glitter like gemstones, and they never show any emotion at all. One of the interludes in Oathbringer involves a woman who is slowly turning into smoke due to using a Soulcaster. She has a hole in her cheek through which the inside of her mouth is visible and has trouble drinking. Another, who makes food, has vines growing all around her face.
Also from Oathbringer, what happened to Amaram when he bonded with powerful Unmade Yelig-Nar. Eyes glowing red, amethyst crystals growing all over his body, his heart and internal organs gone, with a dark violet crystal taking their place.
Mutavus in Super Minion. When someone is on the brink of death, there's a chance that they might trigger the virus, causing their body to mutate wildly in an attempt to save their life. It frequently works, but it can come at the cost of grotesque physical changes. And if the changes it decide to make require more biomass, it can be bad news for a lot more people than just the one mutating.
After Harmodius screws up a healing spell, Gavin slowly starts growing scales — and, eventually, bone spines — first on his shoulder, and then slowly spreading throughout the rest of his body.
Ash invokes this every time he chooses to pick A Form You Are Comfortable With. While his forms are more comfortable than a city-sized dragon, they include such delights as conjoined twins with oversized heads, a woman rotting from the inside out, or a contorted jester.
At one point, Thorn possesses a dead body that's spent too much time in the water to have a conversation. The effect is suitably disgusting.
As Kevin Orley gives into Ash's influence, he slowly starts growing horns. Then he grows in size and bulk, then his face becomes twisted, then he slowly starts oozing some sort of oily substance from his pores that serves as his armour...
In Trollhunters, Nullhullers are able to vomit up virtually every one of their internal organs with the exception of their hearts to make themselves more nimble. When Jim tries to take their gallbladders from the vomited entrails, all of their other organs come to life and try to attack him.
The War Against the Chtorr: In A Rage for Revenge, the leader of a cult that worships the alien invaders removes his clothes to reveal that his body is covered in 'worm fur', the neural symbionts that act as sense organs for the Chtorran worms. And in A Season for Slaughter, an expedition discovers that Chtorran cities are somehow capable of transforming the lifeforms within them — including captive humans.
In the later books of The Wheel of Time, there is body horror all over the place when the Dark One's prison weakens and he can begin to "touch the world". What's worse is that it always strikes out of nowhere. One man is feverish and then suddenly bursts into flame and slowly burns to death. Some people are found as charred corpses in their beds. Another guy explodes into a swarm of bugs. There are several more as well.
In Wicked, here's one that will definitely cause Brain Bleach, Nausea Fuel, horror, and Squick: Illanora has her vagina sewn shut.
Wild Cards" An alien bioweapon is released over New York. 90% of humans are unaffected. 90% of the affected die. That leaves 1% survivors. Out of them, 10% gain some kind of superpower and look normal. The other 90% who gain superpowers are pure nightmare fuel.
The Witches: In the chapter "Metamorphosis", the witches hold down the boy protagonist and feed him Mouse-Maker, which transforms him into a mouse permanently and painfully. The transformation isn't permanent in the 1990 film, but the visuals make it even more disturbing.
The main character in A Wolf in the Soul turns into a wolf at night — and incompletely back into a human during the day.
The X-Files: In the novel Antibodies, a man who assisted with developing nanomachines that can cure any disease, is forced to inject himself with an early prototype of it to avoid a certain death. Since these machines can't fix him properly, his body is slowly breaking down, worsened by any physical trauma done to it. He eventually turns into a super-strong monster covered in tentacles.
(sorry, but that's what characters call them!) in Dreamcatcher.
