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MANILA, Philippines – Today, we understand “weird” as being synonymous with “odd” or “quirky.” But according to Merriam-Webster, the word actually originates from the Old English noun “wyrd,” which means “fate,” and its use evolved from the 8th century, through to the 15th and 16th centuries.
Shakespeare then popularized the term when he referred to the three witches in Macbeth as the “weird sisters.” But this isn’t about Shakespeare — or any man, for that matter.
The figure of the witch (or wisewoman) goes way back, back to a time when people saw nature and the world as mystical, a time when magic was on everyone’s minds. And magic was the province of women.
Then, of course, there were the infamous witch trials, which took women’s power away from them, forcing them to be kept confined to the household, unless they wanted to be caught “cavorting with the devil by moonlight.” This set the stage for the global issues women face today.
The weird girls are the girls who refuse to believe that this is the reality we’ve inherited. The girls who have turned to horror and true crime stories, astrology and A24 films, to cope with all of it. The girls who crave the strange, mystical, and otherworldly. The girls who dream of a time past when power was in our hands. The weird girls are the girls who are angry.
Here are some books to add to your arsenal of female rage that are so strange, disgusting, or grotesque they make our day-to-day reality just a little bit easier to face:
Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
Trigger warnings: body horror, animal cruelty, blood, cannibalism, death, gore, murder, violence, sexual violence
Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh is a dystopian slash horror slash science fiction novel that takes place in a not-so-distant future where a virus has infected all animals, rendering all meat poisonous and inedible, leading to the legalization of human (“special”) meat consumption and the breeding of humans as livestock.
Marcos, the main character, works at one of these meat processing plants. Then one day, he’s given a live, human being whom he names Jasmine, as a gift. Things get complicated when Marcos finds himself falling for Jasmine — someone he is meant to see as no more than a product, no better than a domesticated animal.
Dark, quietly horrifying, and sad, Tender Is the Flesh employs cannibalism as a device to explore themes of power and privilege, animal rights and patriarchy, in a work that seems to raise the same questions we have been pondering over for the longest time rather than provide solutions.
But just like in real life, there are no solutions — only trade-offs. The benefits of letting yourself be consumed by an oppressive system often outweigh the cost of rebelling against it.
For the budding weird girls who are looking to get into horror and gore, Tender Is the Flesh might be a good place to start.
Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval
Jenny Hval’s debut novel is about the female body, sexuality, the double whammy of being a woman and queer, and how we have been programmed to see (and hear and smell and taste and touch) a certain way, a way that can cloud our judgment and lead to self-policing our thoughts, feelings, and desires.
Paradise Rot renders these unwelcome sensations almost corporeally, really appealing to the senses — you can feel the soft skin of the mushrooms that sprout, smell the rotting fruit in the bin, hear the house breathe and moan.
This book is deeply uncomfortable and disgusting in the best way possible, and sapphic in the worst way possible. We follow Jo as she finds herself living in a house that resembles a decaying Garden of Eden, with her new roommate, the attractive but fragile Carral, as the former grapples with her burgeoning queer sexuality.
For the sapphic girlies still reeling from the pain of their first heartbreak, or wallowing in the middle of one of those occasional bouts of lesbian angst, Paradise Rot will make you feel seen, understood, in all of our ugly.
Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh
Trigger warnings: blood, body horror, cannibalism, death, gore, murder, sexual violence, sexual content, starvation, vomiting, violence, animal cruelty, suicide
The medieval village where this book takes place becomes a claustrophobic container for questions of faith, corruption, power, and patriarchy in Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh. (Are we sensing a theme here?)
One character, Ina, the village midwife, breastfed almost everyone in the village and yet is ostracized — treated like an outsider, a monster, a witch.
Gifted with the ability to communicate with the natural world, Ina embodies both woman and nature. Both of which we have sucked dry, burned down, destroyed, and abused in exchange for their unwavering nurture and support. Lapvona comments on these injustices through body horror and frightening imagery.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
The story takes place in a small, remote village on a plateau. One night, a body is found. And then another. And another. Janina Duszejko, a retired old woman who devotes her days to astrology, animal rights, and the poetry of William Blake, takes it upon herself to figure out whodunit.
Janina finds that what the murders all have in common, is that they were of men who were actively involved in the plateau’s local animal hunting industry. She is convinced that these deaths are the animals taking revenge, but of course, given her age, gender, and peculiar interests, she is written off as just a madwoman.
In Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, through her emasculation of the detective novel, Tokarczuk (a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature) explores themes of patriarchy and violence against the natural world.
This book is for the women who, like Janina, have felt sidelined or written off, for the Agatha Christie fans and mystery girlies, and even the astrology girlies who, perhaps in their disappointment in structures of power and the “scientific and rational,” have turned to the mystic arts to find order in the chaos.
Girls Against God by Jenny Hval
Trigger warnings: sexual imagery
The last book and the second Jenny Hval book on this list, Girls Against God grapples with a lot of the same themes as Paradise Rot — isolation and belonging, female impulses, bodies, burgeoning queerness, nature, myth, and monsters.
Told from the POV of a nameless narrator, this book is a horror story, a feminist manifesto, a written proposal for an experimental film, an essay on magic/witchcraft and gender, and an artist’s poetics all in one.
Hval’s God is not the all-encompassing, all-loving, and all-accepting God, but rather this cold, patriarchal, discriminating, and moralizing figure that humanity has turned God into.
If you’ve already read Paradise Rot and want to see more of Hval, or if you’re looking for something completely singular, something you’ve never read before, this book is for you.
For the Catholic school girlies, the feminist theory girlies, the A24 girlies, this book is for you. For the haters, the angry girls who love to hate, this book is for you. – Rappler.com
Bea Gatmaytan is a Rappler intern studying Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines Diliman.
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