By Dee Holloway 
Like the disappearing schoolgirls in Picnic at Hanging Rock, the landscape seemed to infect me…
Saskia Nislow, author of Root Rot (Creature Publishing, March 2025), offers their perspective on the relationship between landscape and body in DIS/MEMBER’s first guest-author column.
What can a body be?
“Ladies, have you ever looked in the mirror and hated what you saw? This is for you.”
Perched on a bar stool on a weeknight with a book in my hand, my thoughts were interrupted by a game of bar trivia. Horror trivia, to be exact. So, while I didn’t participate, I stopped reading and listened in with some interest. When the organizer made this announcement, I scratched my head trying to parse what it meant until they explained. They were about to begin a themed round. The theme? Body horror.
I was horrified. To simplify a category like body horror into the horror of hating your body, or — even worse — the horror of having an “ugly” body turns the idea of body horror into something I can’t recognize. This experience reminded me of how tricky it can be to try to categorize horror, a genre that so often works around and beyond boundaries. To attempt to explain what horror is, what makes something a particular type of horror, is difficult. But this difficulty is valuable. It’s what leads us to new places, new ideas. Pat descriptions like the one above don’t tend to lead anyone anywhere.
At its most basic, body horror takes up the horror of being a body. And there’s plenty of horror to be found there, plenty of different directions to take. But what’s even more interesting to me is when body horror explores, and expands, ideas of what a body can be. Think of The Salaryman ballooning into snarled masses of wires and circuits in Tetsuo: The Iron Man, the feral pack of sometimes-animal children of Joy Williams’ The Changeling, machines and wreckage and sex and gender all smashing into each other in David Cronenberg’s Crash and Julie Ducournau’s Titane. These stories intimately, viscerally tackle the experience of living in a body by working at the knife’s edge between self and other.
I began my novella, Root Rot, while I was a resident of the Blue Mountain Center, which is located at the edge of a lake out in the Adirondacks. It was August and the days were warm and long and full of quietly bustling plant and animal life. It’s hard, in a setting like that, to write anything without the landscape seeping in. So, as I was thinking about this story I was writing about bodies and families — two different types of complex systems— I couldn’t help but notice the different systems all around me that could be seen as bodies, or as families, in their own right— the woodpiles softened by ground rot, beetles and ants scurrying through the trapped leaves underneath, the leaves disintegrating into the soil… And then, of course, the soil itself, which is one of the most interesting bodies of them all — plant, animal, and mineral all in one, organic and inorganic, rotting and growing, alive and dead.
As I sat out on the porch of the main residency building each day and watched the world around me, the boundary between my own body and the world outside began to decay in my mind. Like the disappearing schoolgirls in Picnic at Hanging Rock, the landscape seemed to infect me. More a mood than a fully-formed thought, but a mood that wasn’t mine even as I experienced it inside of me. Something catching in me and then drawing me in.
I remembered having similar experiences as a child. I had them often, not just when I was out in the woods, but when I was in groups of people. It’s easier, I think, for children to get caught up in collective experiences. Or, put another way, it’s easier for children to understand themselves as parts of something larger than themselves, whether that be a family, a group of friends, or the world around them. And, because of this, children can also have a more difficult time distinguishing between what is them and not them or seeing themselves as their “own” person.
In Root Rot, we start off with the child characters as a collective, speaking as one. One large body. Or perhaps as one limb of the larger body of their family. Like the ants working together to remove edible rot from the woodpile, they are both a collective organism and a part of a larger system. The family informs how this group of children understand themselves, as well as informing more concrete things like where the children go, how much time they spend together, when they eat and sleep, etc etc. As they begin to explore and play in the woods around The Lake House, the boundaries around the collective become more porous and the children start to merge more and more with the even larger body of the landscape.
Bodies, families, nature: nesting dolls with complex relationships to each other and to themselves, as well as different relationships with power. The patriarch of the family in Root Rot, The Grandfather, sits at the center of the family, influencing and manipulating individual family members for his own benefit. He is, essentially, the owner of the family. This relationship, as in many families, reverberate down through generations, creating links of subject and object, ownership and control. The children sit at the bottom of this chain, owning nothing except for their own bodies. Even this is up for debate, as we see with the character of The Liar. For all children, but especially for trans children, locating themselves within their own bodies can be a matter of needing to extricate their bodies from their family’s claims on them.
Because who does a body belong to? And what is a body for? What is it supposed to do? The answers to any these questions seem to dissolve as they form. A body is supposed to stay alive but it’s also supposed to die. A body changes continuously while also staying itself. These questions become even thornier when we begin thinking about how much a body is “supposed to” or “allowed to” change and who can make that decision.
In contrast to many family systems, nature is inherently decentralized, forever shifting and transforming. While this movement and these transformations can be controlled to an extent, this control is often an illusion. As the children in the story become absorbed into the land, their bodies transform into something new. What this means for them — especially The Liar, who is already chafing against the confines of the family structure — you will have to read the book to find out. Root Rot investigates the limits of body horror and bodies themselves and, finding no limits, seeks to expand.
Saskia Nislow is a writer, ceramicist, and psychoanalytic training candidate based in Brooklyn, where they live with their partner and three cats. You can find Saskia at saskianislow.com or follow them @cronebro on Instagram. Our thanks to Saskia for this insightful column… and alluring introduction to Root Rot! Out now from Creature Publishing, Root Rot is available through the publisher’s website, Bookshop, and your local library. Happy reading, ghouls!
