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And everything happening this week for Future Fest!

As part of Future Fest, I'm here to examine the trends in the literary world that I think we'll see more of in the near future. And I think the premise of Future Fest is even more exciting to take a look at, because novels are conceived, written, edited, and then published on a much faster timeline than movies, television shows, or most video games are. I mean, Stephen King wrote The Running Man in the span of a week. With that in mind, I think we can look at fiction, particularly genre fiction, as a responsive force that's reflective of contemporary cultural conversations. Writing doesn't take place in a bubble. 

As such, given the current legislative attacks on reproductive rights across the country and the proliferation of tradwives on social media, I have reason to believe that we will be seeing more femgore books and other stories involving femme body horror in the near future. While stories involving body horror and female perspectives aren't new, (Megan James from the band Purity Ring sang, "Get a little closer, let fold/Cut open my sternum and pull/My little ribs around you/The lungs of me be under, under you" on their song "fineshrine" back in 2012) femgore has rapidly gained popularity within the past year. Interesting, I wonder what historical event could have possibly set the stage for the return of femgore, he says, before screaming into a pillow. 

The literary femgore boom hasn't gone unnoticed, either. Hollywood has swooped in, with movie adaptations of Virginia Feito's Victorian Psycho and Monika Kim's The Eyes Are The Best Part already in the works. So with that in mind, let's take a blood-soaked deep dive into the femgore subgenre and why we can expect to see much more of it in the future. 

What do we mean when we say 'femgore'?

I've seen femgore defined as gory books about women, for women, written by women. But I think that's a simplistic definition that glosses over the thematic material entrenched within these books. To me, the ingredients of femgore are any combination of the following:

• A female protagonist
• A story that involves gender-based violence and/or explorations of systemic misogyny and/or female agency within powerful institutions
• Gore and body horror
• At least one moment where a female character experiences catharsis through committing an act of violence (usually against a man) 

Personally, I don't think that femgore is limited only to the work of cis and transgender women writers, when nonbinary writers have also contributed to the genre. 

Femgore shows no signs of slowing down

Here are some quotes from books that I think are emblematic of my definition of femgore:

• "I fail to understand why men think violence will intimidate women. Women, who bleed all over themselves every month, who rub blood clots between their fingers and burst them like insects, and sometimes can't because they're not blood clots, they're tongue-coloured strings of meat from the womb." - Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito
• "So I rent him in half: lengthwise and real fucking slow, suspending him in the air so his guts sheeted down on me in a porridgy red rain. I didn't let him go gentle into that good velvet night, and I took as much time as I'm sure he'd wanted to with me." -The Library at Hellebore by Cassandra Khaw
• "A jet of blood sprouted from the wound. Lucy got caught in the spray. It rained down on her, hot and salty, but only for a few seconds. She wiped the worst of it away from her skirt, making sure to keep the muddied hem away from her eyes, then watched Michael bleed out." -Blood On Her Tongue by Johanna van Veen. 
• "But white men are going after Asian girls, and that's all they have to go on, us being Asian. No one wants to look harder at us. To imagine that we're real people. Every day I clean up their brains and blood, and I know that a white man coming for me isn't an if, it's a when." -Bat-Eater And Other Names For Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker

Now, Victorian Psycho, The Library at Hellebore, Blood On Her Tongue, and Bat-Eater And Other Names For Cora Zeng all came out this year. And pardon my phrasing, but I think there's a real hunger among readers for more stories like them. I'm certainly here for femgore. Victorian Psycho and Bat-Eater And Other Names For Cora Zeng I consumed in a single sitting, because the narrative voices of both books were so compelling. 

All of these books attest to the flexibility of femgore within different story settings. Victorian Psycho is set in, you guessed it, Victorian England, as it follows a psychopathic governess. The Library at Hellebore is a dark subversion of the magical school trope as it blends into a contemporary fantasy story. Blood On Her Tongue takes place in 1887 in the Netherlands. And finally, Bat-Eater And Other Names For Cora Zeng is set in the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City. 

If anything, the rise of femgore proves how human history is riddled with misogynistic oppression. As all of these books evidence, femgore is ripe for new interpretations from authors who come from various intersectionalities. Femgore provides a space for female and nonbinary authors to rage against the systems that marginalize them, and I think that in the future, we'll be seeing more femgore stories that aren't based around a contemporary, white, able-bodied vision of femininity. 

Just like yourself, the Popverse staff spends a whole lot of time with our respective noses in respective books. It's why we've come up with stuff like:

• The hottest upcoming fiction
• Queer romance to add to your reading list
• A genre fiction literary column called If It Bleeds, We Read

...and a whole lot more. Join our metaphorical library, won't you? There are no late fees and you can be as loud as you want, so long as the people you live with are OK with it.