Occupying Bodies

You can escape your past, your fears, even your mind—but never the body you occupy.

The body is the first prison, the final battlefield, and the one thing we can never abandon. Yet what happens when the flesh betrays us, when consciousness claws against its cage, when skin, bone, and blood twist into something unrecognisable?

Occupying Bodies is a visceral anthology of body horror that explores the dread of living inside fragile, treacherous vessels. Within these pages, nightmares take the form of grotesque mutations, psychological unravelings, everyday afflictions magnified into terrors, and Cronenbergian transformations that defy imagination. Each story forces us to confront the inevitability of flesh—the aches, the ruptures, the decay—and asks whether escape is salvation or damnation.

Curated by Bernardo Villela, this collection gathers diverse voices united by one chilling truth: no monster is more intimate, more inescapable, than the body you inhabit.