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Monstrous Bodies: Feminine Power in Young Adult Horror Fiction. By June Pulliam. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014.
Reviewed by Sara Austin
June Pulliam's book is, as its title suggests, a feminist project. She concludes, "Monsters are a girl's best friend, and they have a lot to teach us" (178). What monsters teach us, according to Pulliam, is how young girls are socialized as gendered subjects (11). Horror fiction denaturalizes the female subject, turning her into the Other. This process shows how many of the supposedly natural attributes of femininity are social constructions that girls can push back against in order to regain agency. Pulliam begins by comparing texts with similar types of female bodies, including ghosts, werewolves, and witches, and then moves outward to compare female agency across the genre.
Monstrous Bodies is divided into three chapters, each focused on a type of embodied horror narrative and a specific element of patriarchal domination. For each chapter, Pulliam selects between five and seven significant texts, including films, novels, and short stories ranging in date of publication from 1989 to 2013, though the majority are from early in this century. Pulliam defines a significant work as one that is owned by approximately a thousand libraries worldwide, and her chapter notes justify the exclusion of certain texts as outside of the parameters of her project (Sabrina is not a horror text, the characters in Charmed are too old, etc.).
For the texts she does choose, Pulliam gives extensive and detailed close readings paired with staples of feminist theory by authors such as Judith...