THEY say that flesh looks more alive when you use green paint.
Not just any green paint, Terre Verte to be exact. Using this shade of green paint for the undertones of the skin makes the complexion feel cooler, more real, and perhaps even breathing. This underpainting technique is known as Verdaccio and was traditionally used during the Italian Renaissance. Verdaccio requires painters to think about flesh as something layered rather than smooth.
Capturing this layered complexion of the human anatomy is not only presented through traditional visual arts, but more recently has gained popularity in contemporary literature.
Just as Verdaccio reveals the hidden layers beneath the paint, contemporary writers are exploring the heightened awareness of the bodily experience. From Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation to Gabriel Smith’s BRAT, this visceral style appears to be gaining literary prominence. Now, weare not only in the minds of characters – such as following characters’ streams of consciousness in a Woolf novel – but rather in the bodies which inhabit them. Some may argue that this emphasis on bodily experience may suggest fears of ageing or illness.
There has always been an emphasis on young people and their bodies. Debates around ‘My body, my choice’ or social comparison of bodies on social media are subjects regularly talked about. However, what about those years in between the so-called “peak” of your 20s and the older years that follow, with wrinkled hands and aching bones? Does this middle ground suggest something unspoken about an increased awareness of our bodies, and how it is being written about? As you hit the “middle age” mark and both women and men experience different menopause/andropause symptoms, some may develop a new relationship with their body.
Initially, the idea of “body image” was discussed on television and in magazines. Once social media took off, it encouraged us to observe bodies, while COVID forced us to live inside of them again. According to NielsenIQ BookData, sales of literary horror and speculative fiction rose by 21% in 2025, suggesting readers are increasingly drawn to darker explorations of the body. By blending the genres of body horror and magical realism, the two have heavily influenced a new genre of speculative and literary horror. Significantly, many of these novels predate the pandemic. Jenny Hval’s Paradise Rot was first published in Norwegian in 2009 (and translated into English in 2018), while Jessica Andrews’s Milk Teeth appeared in 2018.
The trend, therefore, cannot be explained by COVID alone. Yet, the pandemic may have changed how readers interpret these books.A press release from the Public Health England titled Seven in 10 adults are motivated to get healthier in 2021 due to COVID-19, suggested growing health consciousness after the 2020 outbreak of COVID. Skin to skin no longer felt safe, but another passage of contamination. Illness becomes the forefront of our minds as we scrub our hands clean. Consequently, novels centred on bodily experience acquire new emotional weight. After years in which touch itself carried the threat of infection, scenes of physical intimacy resonate differently.
Yet, there may be alternative reasons as to why readers would be enticed to this style of writing. Ageing and memories may be initially sought as themes which concern the mind, although we tend to have the scars that are reminiscent of the past laid out on our body. Perhaps the popularity of body fiction is owed less to literary trends and more to the demographic reality. Britain is ageing. We are becoming more aware of our bodies of illness and physical decline, as it all becomes more visible in public discourse. Nobel Prize Winner for Literature Annie Ernaux’s The Years captures this impersonal autobiography of a collective ‘we’ that further highlights the raw realism of the female body and its journey through life.
The canvas of skin is filled with delicate lines, lost pigmentation in places that have loosened and stretched across our lives, all while being the very barricades of ourbodies. We are sealed shut beneath its walls. However, writers of today are exploring the layers in-between the pages, highlighting something that goes beneath flesh; post- pandemic society learning to inhabit its own skin again.
