Book Review : Joe Koch - The Wingspan of Severed Hands (2020)
Body horror is the weird cousin of horror subgenres. You know, the one who owns a knife and keeps his headphones on at family gatherings? A good body horror story will not scare you in the conventional sense of the term, but it will leave you freaking out about the ways your own body will turn against you. You won’t have nightmares, but you’ll look at yourself in the mirror a whole lot. Joe Koch’s debut novella The Wingspan of the Severed Hands does some of that and so, so much more.
Fuck, how do I even summarize what this novella is about? A young woman named Adira who seems to undergo a severe psychotic break after a traumatic event (that I won’t spoil). Somewhere else, two scientist are working on a psy-ops weapon in a secret facility and it goes south in the worst possible way. What ensues can only be described as an hypnagogic, hallucinogenic cosmic battle where the inner and the outer world of the protagonists become intertwined in a waking nightmare.
Beyond the wall of reason
Horror novels about the limits of human understanding are not that uncommon. Not providing any clear answers is a very good way to scare the shit out of people. The Wingspan of Severed Hands has its own unique twist on this old technique. The Adira and Bennet chapters are governed my two distinct ideas: thinking vs feeling. While Adira can only feel the traumatic changes to her body and surroundings as a victim of forces she can’t control, Bennet operates in a science lab, the theatre of the mind itself.
Not only human understanding is ultimately futile in The Wingspan of Severed Hands, but they have to let go of any form of rationalization. Feeling is all there is. Joe Koch hammers this point by crafting these gorgeous, tactile Adira chapters (which eventually bleed into the Bennet chapters) where there’s little to no meaning outside of the psychedelic transformations you read on the page. He makes you surrender control. I mean, there is ultimately story and meaning. But the point is to feel the chaos, the fear and the hurt.
For that reason, it’s sometimes easy to lose the highway when reading The Wingspan of Severed Hands. It’s sometimes a challenge to understand the subtleties in this literal assault on the senses. I had to go back and forth sometimes because I had missed important details. It can be frustrating, but the sheer challenge kept me under nonetheless. I love when an author trusts their audience to be smart and to care about the world they created. This dichotomy between thinking and feeling was fiercely original.
David Cronenberg would be proud
The Wingspan of Severed Hands is not just a body horror novel. It has cosmic horror elements and some parts borderline on fantasy, but let me stress is: it does body horror REALLY good. The idea behind good body horror is simple: it has to represent a fear that the reader can share. Akira was motivated by fear of technology for example. Adira’s Cronenbergian deconstruction is motivated by trauma and abuse and the inevitable escape into the imaginary survivors have to make in order to cope with their pain.
It really, really reminded me of how film director David Cronenberg sees the body, particularly Videodrome and a quiet movie he made in 2002 called Spider, where a schizophrenic man is inexplicably let out of his institution. The Wingspan of Severed Hands has similar shifting realities, where the mind turns on the body. Each time Adira escapes from her unbearable reality, a little less of her comes back until the transforms completely and majestically and terrifyingly too. Her fate is not for the faint of heart.
*
I really liked The Wingspan of Severed Hands. It’s different from everything you’ve ever read and it’s so raw and kinetic that I don’t think it can be emulated. It’s very much a 201 class given by a dedicated horror fan for dedicated horror fans. Casual reads who just want get poolside thrills this summer might hate this. It’s the kind of book you read when you’re bored with horror and looking for new and exciting directions it might take. Joe Koch is an intriguing one. You might see him name here again in the future.
