Tag: carrying

Carrying is a body horror novel about a stealth trans woman who becomes pregnant and finds herself with a mysterious illness that requires experimental treatments. Martha has it all: the house, the husband, a lovely stepdaughter. Nobody in her life now–except one old friend–knows she is trans. She finds herself faking pregnancy, trying to appease her husband’s desire for another child, when suddenly she starts feeling unwell, and then discovers she is actually pregnant. As her baby develops, her strange illness leads her to even stranger treatment, and she has to build lie upon lie to get her dream of motherhood.

This book is a take on trans body horror that I’ve never seen before. I love how it goes down the route of a lot of recent body horror films like The Substance and Love Lies Bleeding in not feeling the need to actually explain the ins and outs of the weird physical stuff going on, but instead is more focused on its characters and what it is saying about the body. Whilst there’s some disgusting body horror, there’s also some emotional moments, particularly as Martha finds herself getting something she never thought she would, but everything still not going smoothly. It is also purposefully ridiculous, never quite asking you to take it seriously or believe that someone like Martha doing these things would actually exist.

I love how this book subverts some of the expectations you might have about trans body horror and find new ways to play with those ideas, whilst also creating some quite tender moments about a woman finding different forms of motherhood and trying to survive them.