The Trans Horror of Alison Rumfitt
A conversation exploring the gruesome worlds of horror writer Alison Rumfitt.
by Mimi Doan and Cole Stapleton
“I never wanted to tell subtle ghost stories. Subtle ghost stories were all the rage back then. Most of them ended on a note of ambiguity. Mine ended on the ghosts being revealed to be real and all the characters that made it to the end burning alive… The borders are closed. The union flag is waving from the top of every tower and every tower is burning.”
Mimi: Alison Rumfitt creates these disgusting little ruined corners of the world, where the only constants are the dark rooms and forums where queer people go to feel free. Outside of these rooms the world is burning. All of our social safety nets—the few that we have—are slowly turning to ash in front of us. AR is part of a generation of writers talking about that incineration. How do you feel about the way that queer, and trans writers specifically, are writing about the worst version of the future?
Cole: I think there is something very trans about the moment that we’re in that a lot of trans writers synthesize really well. AR’s work talks a lot about the trans now. She writes about lots of different types of horror, but transphobia seems to always be at the heart of the terror in her work. Part of what makes the violence in her books so scary and unsettling is that it’s so specific—certainly not ‘subtle’ as she writes in the introduction. I think the future, as AR sees it, is not a subtle story either.
I feel like her characters are often in an act of tunneling. They’re trying to see their way through something but they’re not walking above ground, they’re not in daylight, they’re not safe as they go. They’re confined to these very limited, narrow pathways. Sometimes it’s through fetish, sometimes through message boards, often both–but in all of it there’s a warping. And there’s a warping to the moment that we’re living in that I think trans people are really familiar with. When you have been the same, but you understand or announce something about yourself that has been true to you, but maybe has changed others’ perception of you, you see the world change really rapidly. I think that this rapid deterioration of your reality is something that every trans person feels and knows about.
Mimi: Coming out is an instant alienation. It can feel like you are the only thing that has stayed the same, and everyone’s world has changed except for yours.
Cole: And it’s central to the book. It’s the motivating factor for the violence that happens really early, the bombing of the clinic.
And within the queer spectrum I think that (the worst version of the future) is something that trans writers specifically are more comfortable with. In a lot of ways I think trans people experience the limits of people’s liberality, especially trans people of color. I think there is a safe space–kind of–that you can still occupy in the world as a queer person right now… but not if you’re a queer person who’s trans. And there is a huge spectrum of transness, from essentially still blending in with heteronormative society: either passing, or as a nonbinary person who doesn’t medically transition at all–to the other end of the spectrum: very visibly trans and unsafe in the public world. I think all people who fall within that spectrum know that the more they might try to become themselves the less safe the world is going to get for them. They feel the limits of “liberal spaces” in a way that other queer people might not. And I think that has a lot to do with how trans people are writing about the future.
Transition itself is kind of a form of horror. This undertaking to change your body, or even just to really reorient your idea of yourself in this world, in order to get closer to something that feels true, or that feels honest… opens you up to the warping of your desire (to feel free in your body) by others.
“I’m not subversive. I’m a cisgender woman.“
“I guess I ended up writing in response to it, though, and I’ll never know what sort of writer I would have been if I didn’t live in this fucking world that forces me to write about transphobia. Maybe I’d write cool horror stories about vampires raping werewolves, ones with no subtext at all.“
Mimi: It’s easy to doom scroll when you feel like there’s nothing else to do but consume the horror. It doesn’t abdicate you of responsibility, it makes you aware of your digital tether to it. We have all of this access to information and our phones become a theater for human suffering. We all have visibility into suffering on a planetary scale, and maybe it just feels easier to feel powerless and worthless than to…
Cole: find safety in any reasonable way… help or make anything better ?
Mimi: What’s freakier than being a void? To see the violence of everyday life, having it forced down your throat everyday, and then being able to remove yourself from that. Reject it even if it’s just by telling yourself that you’re worthless – inconsequential, released from the responsibility of living at all.
Cole: Yeah I was going to say relief. Because if you don’t find meaning in your life or if you’re really busy torturing yourself you can make the external violence feel like something you deserve. Or even something that you want to metabolize sexually. I think that there’s a really interesting use of fetish in her works. It gets at the darkness that’s in the external world of these characters; in order to reveal something about their internality. I think we fetishize what we see… and when everything we see is violence, it shows up in our desires too somehow.
Mimi: Where did you feel the disgust in your body while reading this book
Cole: God it was really nauseating. I think the scenes where Vanya is getting infected and learning about her infection in a very physical way: when she’s throwing up and she stops being able to move around comfortably in the world… I really felt like I was going to vomit.
Mimi: I felt really similarly. For me what triggered my disgust was when Frankie found out about Vanya’s infections. Imagine going down on your girlfriend and coming up back up with a mouthful of worms. Then worms are in you… and suddenly you’re shitting and puking worms.
Cole: Allison Rumfitt is so special.
Mimi: No one does horror like trans people. Who better to imagine all the possible ways to have and eviscerate a body than trans people?
Cole: Through both of AR’s books Tell Me I’m Worthless and Brainwyrms I find that there’s a fetish for feeling worthless. It’s this kind of tunneling that I described earlier. AR’s characters will see something horrible, and they have to get closer to it. They have to check the lake for their own reflection, and fall forward into it. I feel like there’s a relationship between that instinct in her characters and how the internet is used in her books.
There are these fetish crawl spaces of the internet where Vanya and Gaz meet—this like infection fetish board—and the blog post that starts the book about the mom who sympathizes with the clinic bomber. All of these spaces are a different kind of “virality” on the internet: what do you feel is the connection between the fetish for worthlessness and how the internet functions in Brainwyrms?
Mimi: There’s totally a connection—in a house of mirrors kind of way. Being worthless becomes an identity, and through the internet they reach towards others who can magnify this sense of worthlessness.
Cole: There’s a magnifying power that the internet plays for these characters: when they enter an online space with their opinions and their fetishes, those curiosities and desires multiply and change their lived reality outside of the internet. I’m wondering how that relates to the fetish for feeling terrible that it seems every character in Rumfitt’s books seems to possess. Maybe it’s something that everyone has… maybe everybody who’s on the internet.
