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Brainwyrms Is the New Terrifying Novel by Alison Rumfitt
I am drawn to extremes and often unwilling to admit I might be scared or grossed out. So, it’s rare for me to read a book I find truly disturbing. But Brainwyrms managed it. Brainwyrms follows the equally brilliant but perhaps marginally less nightmarish Tell Me I’m Worthless. However, Alison Rumfitt’s sophomore novel is genuinely one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever read. There is one scene, in particular (in which Alison Rumfitt actually warns the reader to take a break before entering) that I don’t think I’ll ever scrub from my memory and will probably be thinking about on my deathbed.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about letting something crawl in my mouth and devour my tongue … taking away my ability to speak, taste, anything, and replacing it with itself.” – Brainwyrms by Alison Rumfitt.
But the author does something even more masterful than creating something so extreme in its darkness. She managed to create something so utterly repulsive that it brushes up against the irredeemable; this is all while still maintaining a sense of poignancy and artistic merit. This is the space I think Brainwyrms inhabits – a book to read only if you dare. However, if you do dare, you’ll be rewarded.
The Plot of Brainwyrms
The novel tells of an antitrans dystopia that is not too far in the future. Frankie, a survivor of a TERF terror attack on a gender affirmation clinic, meets Vanya, a nonbinary youth with an unbearably dark past, at a secret sex party. But as the two get closer, we learn their lives are connected in all manner of dark and disturbing ways. Oh, and there are parasitic creatures infesting everybody.
The reason I believe the foulness of Brainwyrms works is because of the foul nature of the world today – particularly when it comes to transness. Real-life hatred towards the trans community is so visceral and abject that supernatural parasitic ‘brainwyrms’ seem almost palatable in comparison. “Her mind was fertile ground for the worms which spawned there. Your mother grew parasites of her own, and she was the perfect breeding ground, ripe like the soil of an orchard.”
Comparing parasite fetishes and TERF ideologies may not be an obvious metaphor, but it’s certainly an evocative one. The idea of your body not being truly your own is one rich with horror context, and this is a true horror faced by trans people today. “You’ll never be more than this, a weeping wound filled with pus, a host to bacteria and things without feeling.”
The Terrorising Idea of the Internet
The book also uses the idea of the internet with veracity and terror. Like a shameful, late-night scroll searching for things we’d be better off not knowing, Brainwyrms appeals to our darkest impulses. “A lot of people think of the internet as a vast lake. It’s deep, dark, and frequently difficult to navigate. There are things at the bottom that have been long forgotten about […]. There is a particular type of fish that lives in its depths, and that type of fish is rare.”
Brainwyrms is fucked up, no doubt – but it is also ingeniously reflective of how fucked up the world feels. It actually goes there … and then goes further. The really frightening thing isn’t the brainwyrms – it’s the simple fact of being alive. “However fast she ran, however quietly she crept, it knew where she was, and it was getting close. It’s the future, she thought as she tried to wake herself up. The thing that’s hunting me is the future.”
In Brainwyrms, the relationships between the real and the allegorical can sometimes feel as slippery as a parasitic worm slithering through our digestive tract. It could be argued that some of the novel’s more distressing facets don’t seem to have a metaphorical meaning and exist just to make our skin crawl. But maybe in a truly depraved and sublime horror story, that’s fine, too.
“Having someone inside of you is the closest form of intimacy, but with humans, we can only experience this briefly during sex.”
You can pick up your copy of Brainwyrms by Alison Rumfitt at Waterstones here.
