It’s a sunny Tuesday when I meet Alison Rumfitt in a cinema cafe in Soho. A Stephen King paperback rests on the table and, when I ask how it is, she admits she’s a slow reader but that doesn’t mean she’s not enjoying it. We quickly get on the same page about a shared puzzlement at the Horlicks behind the bar, a rejection of Goodreads, and grief over The Last Voyage of The Demeter, the new Dracula movie yet to be given a UK cinematic release.
“I’m so mad about that. I need Boat Dracula. I reckon if they’d actually just called the film Boat Dracula — often the films that have done well have terrible one note titles — it would be doing better.” I ask if this was Alison’s intention when she named her second novel Brainwyrms. “I was trying to come up with a title that you could see on the cover of some grody 80s paperback,” she explains.
Alison first shocked and horrified readers with her debut novel Tell Me I’m Worthless. In it, two queer women try to reckon with their experiences in a haunted house. Albion, the abode in question, is not just any haunted house but a sentient being trying to speed up the rising tide of fascism in Britain. Since the book’s release in 2021, readers have come to trust in Alison’s writing to not only offer a transgressive queer perspective but to push every possible button.
Brainwyrms holds even more shocking imagery than the last — and does exactly what it says on the tin. When Frankie meets Vanya at a sex party, they’re quickly drawn to one another. But as their relationship develops and the couple’s kinks are explored, Frankie discovers that Vanya is hiding something. Frankie’s piss and breeding kinks are one thing but whatever Vanya’s into might be more than Frankie can handle. “I was just like, I wanna write something nasty,” Alison says, smiling. “It’s a nasty book, it’s doing nasty things.”
Since reading Brainwyrms, I can’t stop seeing worms everywhere. There’s worms in songs, and leeches and parasitic infestations fill my FYP. I tell her that I am worm-pilled. Having written Brainwyrms prior to Heidi Klum’s worm costume, Alison’s novel is oddly prophetic of the growing trend. In Brainwyrms, Vanya finds a forum for parasite fetishists and the stories they tell each other detail worms in much the same way that is trending on TikTok. Alison doesn’t have TikTok, so I describe the guy with overflowing buckets of leeches. “That feels fetishistic in a way that’s impossible to describe,” she says. “He probably wouldn’t know and the people consuming that probably don’t know, but that’s fetish content.”
Alison’s parasitic themes aren’t solely for shock value; between the sex parties, polyamorous dating and poor consent communication, Alison is rooting out the problems in queer communities. “Tell Me I’m Worthless is about isolation while Brainwyrms is about the nightmare of queer dating and the difficulties of constructing any community,” she says. But everything in Brainwyrms has a sardonic edge to it. “I did a lot of research into fetish communities,” she continues. “You’re the only people in the world who have these interests, and [yet] you’re so passionate about finding problems with the way other people engage in this thing.”
The novel goes far beyond what slips through social media community guidelines; it is, as she aptly puts it, “a descent into the circles of abjection hell”, with one particular moment challenging even those readers with a strong reflex. To counteract this shocking event, Alison has included an author’s note advising the reader to take a break – another taste of her wicked sense of humour. “That’s just me being a fucking troll,” she says. After the first book’s content warning was appreciated by readers, she felt she had to include one at the beginning of Brainwyrms too, adding that “it’s partly a self-protection thing”. But the author’s note is her turn to play with us. “I don’t have much of an ideological feeling about whether books should have a content warning,” she says, laughing. “I’m just being a piece of shit, I like to have fun.”
Tell Me I’m Worthless was an unflinching critique of the rampant transphobia in Britain, and while Brainwyrms still features TERFs, it’s in a mocking tone rather than a fully fledged rebuttal. Her second novel’s continually playful tone shows a change in her as an author. She states that Brainwyrms “is in a different register” demonstrating a “change in my mindset over the past couple of years”. Put simply? “I don’t want to have to dismantle their idea,” she says.
When I ask if the author protects herself when writing on taboo subjects, she admits, “I’m not very good at protecting myself, I probably should be better”. But perhaps her toying nature itself is a form of protection. Alison chooses extreme horror, using it as a vehicle to tackle similarly extreme transphobia in Britain: “if I was doing anything I’d be using it as a way to talk about that, so I might as well use the genre I’m particularly interested in.”
For Alison — and, indeed, for any artists that create transgressive works —there’s always a worry that it will only be taken for shock value. We get on to the topic of Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts — a 2004 novel about gay sex workers encountering extreme violence — and its recent revival online. Alison’s aware that her penchant for extreme horror could go the way of The Sluts: “it’s a two-pronged sword because people only engage in The Sluts as a book that is shocking and not a book that is artfully talking about dynamics within the gay community”. She hopes that readers will engage with Brainwyrms artfully and “not just a thing where there’s an entire aside about a coprophile”.
Alison is certainly in possession of one of the most disturbing imaginations of our time. This year alone she’s covered paedophile hunting in The Nonce, a Buffalo Bill type skin-collecting serial killer in the Peach Pit anthology (September 2023) and, of course, Brainwyrms (October 2023). I’m curious as to whether there’s any taboo she won’t touch but apparently not. “I’m too interested in things; I won’t write about everything the same way,” she says. After all, for her and the niche following of extreme horror readers she’s found, “the extremity of human emotion and behaviour is too interesting”.
Alison flashes a cloying smile. “I can’t get away from writing horrible things, I’m a provocateur at heart.”
Credits
Photography Milo Matthew