Brainwyrms Abridged
book review
To be totally honest, I have been trying to find a book as good as Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin, since I finished the book last summer. I loved Manhunt in large part because of the way the story played in between sexy and scary, and because it gave me a good outlet for anxieties I have as an embodied trans person. It was something of a relief, in my experience, to be scared about a fictional TERF Militia, instead of speculating about whether or not I should be scared of a real one. So I keep my eye on the upcoming releases, especially those put out by Tor Nightfire, and I always listen to Gender Reveal. That’s how I heard about Brainwyrms.
Brainwyrms is the new release by British writer Alison Rumfitt, who comes from an experimental poetry background. Her writing has been on my radar for a moment, but I’ve yet to read her debut novel, Tell Me I’m Worthless. The title alone sends shivers down my spine. But something about the premise of her newest release was irresistible for me - after it was released, I went around from bookshop to bookshop looking for a copy, and found that people weren’t really stocking it because the cover was so gross. One friend at an indie bookseller told me that the owner of the shop where she works threw the advance reader copy away because she couldn’t handle looking at it. This only increased my anticipation.
The novel explores the way transphobia seeps into people’s consciousness. It uses a satisfyingly simple analogy - a literal worm that infects people’s brains - to dive into the atmosphere of British transphobia, with a bleak, cold, and vast outlook on what is to come. I was excited to read something fun and scary, and when I finally got my hands on the book I started eating through it like a bag of chips. But in the process of reading, I found myself having to take on a more serious tone - this book is not an adventure. There were moments where I was so overwhelmed, I thought I was going to cry.
The location of horror is interpersonal, sexual, and familial, so the moments of horror are twinged with feelings that are difficult to grapple with - Disgust. Guilt. Shame. Itchiness. Ineviability. The world of Brainwryms is relatively small, focusing primarily on one relationship between two trans* folks - Vanya, a very young person who wants to be completely dominated by their partner, and Frankie, a post-op trans-woman who is the recent survivor of a bombing at her workplace, a gender identity clinic that provides healthcare to minors. The book’s second half plunges into Vanya’s psyche to unravel the layers of trauma handed down to her by her family, and how much of that trauma lives in her body through her sexuality. A huge part of the book is oriented around being a host. Vanya explores a variety of submissive kink postures, including exploring a sexual interest in having parasites in their body.
Everything in the novel cuts very close to the chest. As I was getting to the book’s thematic climax, a chapter called “Screw the Roses,” the debauched imagery of the novel began to synthesize for me into a piercingly articulate treatise on the way all of our brains are porous to what is going on for the people around us, the way that porousness is exploited by the powerful, and the violent consequences that come from the feeling of being trapped.
The characters - trans and cis - are also hosts to vicious ideas about femininity that shape their capacity to connect with others, and with their own embodied experiences of their genders. Throughout the novel, Frankie is unable to escape a paranoia that the world around her is obsessed with the genitals that she doesn’t even have anymore - and her paranoia is consistently justified by the behavior of the people around her.
Rumfitt’s background as an experimental writer is really exciting to witness and her formal bravery makes me jealous. The worm as a phallic metaphor is brilliantly utilized in the book’s final moments, as the novel breaks down into the overtly symbolic, and she aspects that could be a bit cheesy instead come off as incredibly bold. There are consistent references in the book to an Eminem lyric that are impossibly effective punches to the gut. I cannot decide if I’m ever going to read a book by her again because this one really fucked me up - but as a lover of good writing, I don’t know how I’m going to resist.
I feel like I can’t recommend Brainwyrms without caveat, and I don’t know if I would feel comfortable enough to say that I “liked it.” I was very uncomfortable while I was reading it. But to me, it presents a very frank portrait of the odds against trans* folks in the modern era. If you fuck with Dennis Cooper, you will probably love it.