STRANGE BODIES by Marcel Theroux – Literary body horror goes existential.
“Am I just a body?” Asks the four year old daughter of Nicholas Slopen, unfortunate protagonist of Marcel Theroux’s metaphysical thriller Strange Bodies. The answer Slopen gives us the reader, “not even that”, is less than comforting. The quest to discover what it is to be human, and how we ignore the truth of the answers we find, fuels the narrative of Strange Bodies, a literary horror novel which terrifies not with gut wrenching gore, but with the existential dread of our own flesh.
Nicholas Slopen is a struggling academic of English literature whose career and family life are slipping from his fingers. But when he is asked to prove the origin of previously unseen letters by Dr Samuel Johnson – writer of the first English dictionary – Slopen sees a chance for redemption. We already know the story will not end well because when we are first introduced to Slopen he has been among the walking dead for some months.
Marcel Theroux demonstrates both great literary craft and an eye for the worst kinds of human suffering as he leads Nicholas down in to an underworld of secret conspiracies and the occult. Theroux succeeds in confronting the reader with all those nasty existential questions most of us spend our lives ignoring, and from them creates a sense of horror much more profound than the generic horror novels the book shares stage furniture with. Strange Bodies will be too scary for most horror readers.
Originally published in SFX magazine.
Damien Walter 
My goal here then is to clarify the uselessness of metaphysics, and then transition from
empiricism (as a counter to moral rationalism), and move more directly into
skepticism. The survival of the soul through the change called death is on the verge of being openly acknowledged by scientists and scholars of academic circles.
It is wise to become the observer as the Buddha suggests.
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