History BodyHorror / Literature

** The short story "Gray Matter" (appears in the collection ''Literature/NightShift'') 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 Creator/ArthurMachen's classic tale "The White Powder", a much more horrific and completely unfunny version of the same phenomenon.

* Creator/RobertSilverberg's ''Downward to the Earth'' has quite a bit of it -- even if [[spoiler:[[AssholeVictim Jeff Kurtz]], at least, kind of [[FateWorseThanDeath had it coming]]]].

* The final book in Literature/TheEdgeChronicles 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.

* ''Literature/{{Goosebumps}}'' naturally has this in droves
** The most famous example is ''Literature/ChickenChicken'' (number 53 of the original series), about two farm kids, Crystal and Cole, who get cursed into turning into chickens after knocking over a strange woman in black. Almost every chapter of the book detailed how the feathers were growing on the kids' skins, how their mouths turned to beaks, how they clucked every time they spoke and no one seemed to care about their transformation.[[spoiler: By the end, they turn back to normal and all seems fine, [[HereWeGoAgain only for the strange woman stare at them and utter the words "Pig pig."]]]]
** ''Literature/MyHairiestAdventure'' is about a boy slowly changing into a dog while nobody around him seems to care ([[spoiler:the twist is that he was always a dog, and an experiment to turn him human is simply wearing off]]). It's all fun and games until you watch it unfolding as a grotesque metaphor for puberty, with the boy shaving off the bizarre hair sprouting all over his body and trying to hold onto his dwindling humanity.
** There's also ''Literature/ILiveInYourBasement''. A girl pulls herself ''inside out through her mouth!''
** A later example is ''Literature/TheLizardOfOz'' where a girly slowly transforms into a lizard, finding that her skin is becoming dry like a lizard.

** 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.

* Many Fairy Tale stories like "Literature/TheDeathOfKoscheiTheDeathless" 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 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.

** ''Literature/TheTommyknockers'' had some teeth-losing, skin transparent...ing, ''genital morphing'' hideousness. It was inspired by "Literature/TheColourOutOfSpace" (see above), as King is a huge Lovecraft fan.

* ''The Dragon's Tooth'' 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 HealingFactor 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.

* ''The Dragon's Tooth'' 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 HealingFactor 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.

* Scott Smith's novel ''Literature/TheRuins'': When a character thinks that the man-eating vines are ''growing underneath his skin'' and begins obsessively cutting himself open to try and get rid of the tendrils. [[spoiler: He's not hallucinating.]]

* ''Literature/GalaxyOfFear'', being [[FollowTheLeader inspired]] by Literature/{{Goosebumps}}, has this now and then. ''The Planet Plague'' features TheVirus which [[spoiler: turns people into {{Blob Monster}}s]] in a rather disgusting way. Thirteen-year-old Tash is injected with some and throughout the book feels [[HatePlague irritable and angry]] as a rash-covered lump on her arm grows and swells until [[spoiler: it splits and starts oozing virus-laden slime that fights her movements]].

** Once [[spoiler: 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" [[spoiler: 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.

** 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 BodyHorror is an act of worship towards the Vong gods, and those two castes are known for excessive displays of devotion); members of the [[MadScientist shaper]] caste prefer to avoid this in favor of more subtle alterations to their internal organs.
** The 2nd half of ''Literature/LukeSkywalkerAndTheShadowsOfMindor'' is a mix of BodyHorror (including one case of AndIMustScream), MindRape, and GoMadFromTheRevelation. All of this with the occasional joke for juxtaposition's sake.

** In ''Literature/TheDarkHalf,'' villain Stark's body "loses cohesion" and he starts to decay and rot.

* Creator/JGBallard, card-carrying futurist that he is, has dabbled in this genre. One of his novels, ''Literature/{{Crash}}'', was adapted to film by Creator/DavidCronenberg (see {{BodyHorror/Film}}).

* Creator/RobertSilverberg's ''Downward to the Earth'' has quite a bit of it—even if [[spoiler:[[AssholeVictim Jeff Kurtz]], at least, kind of [[FateWorseThanDeath had it coming]]]].
* In ''Literature/DragonBones'', Oreg recounts how he was turned into castle Hurog. While the process [[AWizardDidIt 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.)

* Dan Simmons' ''Literature/HyperionCantos'' 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 ''Literature/IHaveNoMouthAndIMustScream'', the horrific supercomputer AM captures five humans to [[ColdBloodedTorture 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 Transformation}}s on the other captives, as well as the one that leads to the title, and [[AndIMustScream the trope it inspires]].
* ''Literature/{{Infected}}'' and ''Contagious'' by Scott Sigler each involves 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 ''Literature/TheIslandOfDoctorMoreau'', where animals are surgically altered in rather horrific ways to make them more like humans.

* ''Literature/NakedLunch'' 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 Drug}}s 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.
** Most of the other novels of Creator/WilliamSBurroughs are also filled with body horror. For instance, 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.

* The natural creation of Whampyri in ''Literature/{{Necroscope}}'' 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).

* ''Literature/ParasiteEve'': [[spoiler: 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.

* The BigBad of ''Literature/RiversOfLondon'' takes [[DemonicPossession possession]] of its hosts, then turns their face into [[spoiler:a lookalike of [[Theatre/PunchAndJudy 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 ''Literature/MoonOverSoho'' the Black Magici...sorry, [[InsistentTerminology Ethically Challenged Magician]] keeps a severed head alive, conscious and enslaved for over four decades, plus has a sideline in creating real {{Cat Girl}}s by fusing people and with actual cats. There is worse, but Nightingale tells viewpoint character Peter Grant that he [[YouDoNotWantToKnow 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.

** The way Vargo Hoat dies in ''A Feast for Crows.'' [[spoiler:The BloodKnight Gregor Clegane (aka the Mountain) chops off his limbs, roasts them, and uses them to feed his prisoners, [[AutoCannibalism 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, [[RoyalInbreeding 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}} backstory]] include all of [[TheCaligula 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 [[spoiler:Daenerys's stillborn son Rhaego]].

* ''Literature/TheStormlightArchive'': Soulcaster [[{{Magitek}} 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 ''Literature/{{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.

* ''Literature/TheWarAgainstTheChtorr''?: 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'', [[spoiler:an expedition discovers that Chtorran cities are somehow capable of transforming the lifeforms within them -- including captive humans.]]
* In the later books of ''Literature/TheWheelOfTime'', 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 ''Literature/{{Wicked}}'', here's one that will definitely cause BrainBleach, NauseaFuel, horror, and Squick: Illanora [[spoiler: has her vagina sewn shut.]]
* The shared-universe series ''Literature/WildCards''. 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.

* In ''Series/TheXFiles'' 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 superstrong monster covered in tentacles.

* ''Literature/MistbornTheOriginalSeries'' includes some of this; [[spoiler: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 ''[[EyeScream shoved into their eyes]],'' among other places; [[spoiler: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 [[BlobMonster blobs of flesh]].]]

** The ninth and lowest circle is where [[EvilIsDeathlyCold traitors are punished by being frozen]]. [[SacredHospitality Traitors to guests]] are frozen in Ptolomea, the third round of the ninth circle. They lie supine with only their faces exposed, and [[EyeScream their tears are frozen in their eye sockets so they cannot cry]]. The fourth and final round is Judecca, where [[UngratefulBastard traitors to masters and benefactors]] are [[CryoPrison completely encased in ice]] and [[AndIMustScream contorted into all sorts of grotesque positions]].

** The ninth and lowest circle is where [[EvilIsDeathlyCold traitors are punished by being frozen]]. [[SacredHospitality Traitors to guests]] are frozen in Ptolomea, the third round of the [[EvilIsDeathlyCold ninth circle]]. They lie supine with only their faces exposed, and [[EyeScream their tears are frozen in their eye sockets so they cannot cry]]. The fourth and final round is Judecca, where [[UngratefulBastard traitors to masters and benefactors]] are [[CryoPrison completely encased in ice]] and [[AndIMustScream contorted into all sorts of grotesque positions]].

** [[SacredHospitality Traitors to guests]] are frozen in Ptolomea, the third round of the [[EvilIsDeathlyCold ninth circle]]. They lie supine with only their faces exposed, and [[EyeScream their tears are frozen in their eye sockets so they cannot cry]].

* ''Literature/TheDivineComedy'': Several levels of Inferno involve grisly torments:

** Thieves are turned into snakes and have to regain human form by attacking others.

** In the ninth circle, [[EvilIsDeathlyCold traitors are frozen to different degrees]] based on the gravity of their sins. Those who betray their kin are frozen up to their necks, those who betray their countries are frozen up to their heads, those who [[SacredHospitality betray guests and hosts]] are frozen up to their faces [[EyeScream with their tears frozen]], and those who betray masters and benefactors are [[AndIMustScream completely encased in ice while contorted into grotesque positions]].

** Fortune tellers have their heads turned around backwards.

** In the ninth circle, [[EvilIsDeathlyCold traitors are frozen to different degrees]] based on the gravity of their sins. Those who betray their kin are frozen up to their necks, those who betray their countries are frozen up to their heads, those who [[SacredHospitality betray guests and hosts]] are frozen up to their faces [[EyeScream with their tears frozen]], and those who betray masters and benefactors are [[AndIMustScream completely encased in ice]].

* ''The Dragon's Tooth'' contains a scene where protagonist Cyrus wakes in the night to find Nolan ripping off his own skin with bare hands and a knife. It turns out that this is a necessary part of his HealingFactor 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.

** 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? [[AndIMustScream Nonononono!]]"

** Yet another two Koontz novels -- ''Literature/FearNothing'' and ''Literature/SeizeTheNight'' -- 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.
** ''Literature/{{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? [[AndIMustScream Nonononono!]]"

* ''Literature/NakedLunch'' 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 FantasticDrugs 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.