Uncanny Valley Girls: Essays on Horror Survival and Love

Poet Lisowski (Girl Work) reflects in these moving personal essays on gender, class, and the pain and redemption found in horror films Confined to a psychiatric ward in her late 20s due to her struggles with self-harm, Lisowski began examining her love of horror films, which she felt showed her “the possibility of a place filled with beauty and pain in equal measure.” In “Ghost Face,” Lisowski remembers latching on to the gauzy vision of California portrayed in the 1996 film Scream as a teenager. At the time, she blamed her sadness on her small North Carolina town, only later realizing “I was already hurt and passed that blame onto the city proper.” Lisowski’s complicated relationship with the South, which marginalized her as a trans person but still privileged her white skin, comes into focus again in “Southern Fried,” in which she is surprised by the tender longing The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s lingering landscape shots spark in her for her childhood home. In the title essay, an elegy to the late artist Greer Lankton, Lisowski explores how trans women challenge conventional understandings of beauty while recalling her struggles with suicidal thoughts. Throughout, Lisowski’s poetic prose stirs with its searing emotional honesty (“But for now the light comes into me like birdsong. Someday, I will be free”). Incisive and affecting, this captivates. (Oct.)