Review of Ryan Harding's Transcendental Mutilation

I loved Transcendental Mutilation; while keeping in line with the visceral prose that defined his infamous first collection, Genital Grinder, Ryan Harding adds elements of atmosphere, cosmic horror, and weird fiction, which lend a more cerebral and somber dimension to his writing.

Besides its more vague meaning of “spiritual,” the word “transcendental” is also a precise reference to Kantian philosophy, and points to the basic structures of human experience, how the world appears to us ordered in space and time, in causal sequences, presence and absence, quantity, and so on. One of the keys to Harding’s stories is that the basic norms of experience are broken, and the subjects enter into a paradoxical, Lovecraftian realm of mutilation. In “Divine Red” and “Temple of Amduscias,” the rules of space are bent as the insides of buildings are incongruent with their outsides, in “Junk” the law of cause and effect is suspended, and the time in “Angelbait” seems to flow differently from ordinary time.

In the Postcript, the author points out that the story “Down There,” about a girl’s fear of the woods, was partially inspired by The Blair Witch Project. I’m a big fan of that horror flick, and I think the way the evil presence of the witch is suggested rather than shown makes the horror more suffocating; it’s as if the forest itself is cursed, and the protagonists, unbeknownst to them except maybe on a subliminal level, are trapped from the moment they step inside. The same goes for “Down There,” the evil is absent, yet omnipresent in the woods, in the bark of trees, in the foliage, in the shadowy corners. Evil is shapeless and lurks. Not fully something, but not nothing either. A malignant nothing.  

Speaking of nothing, “Temple of Amduscias”,  has a more existentialist element to it as Olivia, the main character, has an obsession with empty, abandoned places. With the faces of the void, the nothing, with hopelessness. The grim mood of this story reminded me of the pessimism pervasive in some other works of cosmic horror or weird horror like Thomas Ligotti, Nicole Cushing, and Curtis Lawson’s The Envious Nothing. 

These journeys through the doors of our perception result in mutilation, but also mutation: “Progression could mean growing new organs and limbs. Perhaps it may also mean losing some of the old ones through an act of transcendental mutilation.” In Ryan Hardin’s universe, like in Clive Barker’s, evil is also an opportunity for transcendence, agony is also a gate toward ecstasy, as it’s showcased in one of the best stories of the volume, “Red Divine.”

I can only skim through the surface of this brilliant, unique collection in this review, but I hope it’s enough to increase the appetite of horror fans. Ryan Harding is an original, powerful voice with a morbid, depraved imagination and a penchant for philosophy. My next stop is Header 3, Harding’s colab with the extreme horror icon Edward Lee.