Everybody’s worried that nobody reads and that the people who do are reading smut. In great quantities, it should be said, but still smut. Since the advent of the novel, our arbiters of morality have made it known that if a book has even a hint of sex in it – especially if that sex is suspected of inflaming the erotic imaginations of featherbrained young women – then it “doesn’t count” as reading. It’s just masturbation.
Earlier this year, a young woman went viral after bragging about reading 100 books or something like it. She was treated like, well, that six-year-old who went viral after reading 100 books. The response to this woman was like the response to the little boy: “Uh, does it count if the books are Curious George?” “Does it count if everything she read was ‘romantasy,’ BookTok’s latest euphemism for PORNOGRAPHY?” And so the wheel turns. Once again, people are criticizing romance novels – see the last 200 years of literary history.
If BookTok is to be believed, you purposely read splatterpunk to traumatize yourself
Romantasy, and indeed, most contemporary romance books, are the backbone of BookTok, the TikTok subculture where they are marketed and sold. Some are leather-bound; some come in elaborate special edition boxes; sometimes their authors are influencers themselves. It’s plausible that this is the future of publishing: sensational, easily digestible books delivered to us via short-form video. Text-based pornography is not the most objectionable genre that BookTok has popularized, though. Another popular genre has somehow evaded scrutiny. It goes by many names. “Extreme horror,” “gore,” and the older, slightly more lived-in label, “splatterpunk.”
On BookTok, a splatterpunk novel’s success seems to be measured less by its story than by the intensity of the reader’s reaction. When someone picks up a splatterpunk book, they’re not expecting to “enjoy” it. If BookTok is to be believed, you purposely read splatterpunk to traumatize yourself. These books promise to “ruin” you, to permanently alter your psychological makeup. And naturally, the more extreme the reaction video you make about the book, the more views your review gets, the more other people want to copy you, the more publicity the book gets. You can imagine the feedback loop this creates. So, after encountering a torrent of TikToks about “the most disturbing books ever written,” I decided to read a couple of them.
The two I chose were Playground (2022) and Distorted Metamorphosis (2025). I figured reading them would be like watching an exploitation horror film – something like Lucifer Valentine’s Slaughtered Vomit Dolls. The point of a movie like Slaughtered Vomit Dolls, if you couldn’t tell by the title, is to see how long the audience can endure it. Not exactly high art, but something. After reading these books, this comparison feels too generous. The newer, BookTok-native species of splatterpunk is bloodless. These books are less like expressions of obsession or perversion than excrement sloshing around TikTok’s collective bedpan.
I’m not going to pretend the imagery in these books isn’t disturbing. It is. In Aron Beauregard’s Playground, which is about children (yet is somehow the least egregious of the books I read), three low-income families accept payment in exchange for letting their children test playground equipment. The children are then forced through a lethal playground-themed obstacle course while their parents are forced to watch.
In Lesley Camphouse’s Distorted Metamorphosis, Nora enters a penitentiary to research inmates convicted of sexually assaulting children and becomes obsessed with one of them. In an attempt to make her adult body more attractive to him, she mutilates herself, delusionally believing her injuries make her look more childlike. By the end of the book, we’ve read about maggot-infested wounds and two murders, one after a consensual but incestuous sex scene.
You’d think that with topics like child murder and sex offenders, there would at least be some conflict – a sense of something happening, even if the prose was garbage. But these books don’t dramatize violence so much as catalogue it. You are reading a list of horrible things, not a story about horrible things. This is a problem that I’ve seen elsewhere online. Here’s an example I’m pretty sure only bothers me, or at least only I’ve noticed. I encounter so many podcast descriptions that claim the episode will be about a long list of fascinating subjects. Then you actually watch or listen, and the episode turns out to be a meandering interview in which each of those subjects is mentioned, but not really spoken about. Yes, there is quite a bit of violence in splatterpunk novels. But that does not mean the books are “about” violence as such. They aren’t about anything.
It’s not transgression for its own sake. They lack the commitment of edgelordism – which at least implies a point of view, if a puerile one. They aren’t, like some of the worst exploitation horror films, “a sequence of images” that barely add up to a story but are still repulsive. They’re just text assembled on a page and, while that text describes acts conventionally understood as depraved, calling the books themselves depraved is somehow too flattering.
To what end were these books written? Are they fun to write? They certainly aren’t much fun to read. Nor are they scary, really. I would venture that it’s some kind of fetish for the author, but how? Even most poorly written erotica – the kind of one-star sludge dredged from the annals of Literotica.com – still betrays some personality. Splatterpunk, on the other hand, is tedious. It’s nontent, featuring blood and guts rather than fat guys eating various foods at the Costco cafeteria. It is an exercise in arranging the words “rape” and “murder” in different configurations in a Google Doc, then self-publishing the result on Amazon in the hope of going viral on TikTok. If these books were just bad, then fine. Plenty of writing is bad. This article might be bad. But part of me wonders if this is some kind of terminus, a final escalation.
We talk a great deal about the same process in pornography – how porn has exhausted sexuality itself, forcing the pornographic gaze to colonize everything else. Sex has been de-eroticized, so now cooking videos and political ads have a sort of desperate, greasy horniness to them. But to me this is much less of a problem than its twin: the pornification of violence.
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