BOOK REVIEW | BODIES OF WORK | CLAY McLEOD CHAPMAN

 

ABOUT THE BOOK

A chilling supernatural revenge novella from the acclaimed author of Wake Up and Open Your Eyes. Perfect for fans of Joe Hill and Delilah S. Dawson. 

At sixty-six years old, Winston Kemper has always been a nonentity. No one notices him. His simple existence barely registers for those who come into contact with him. Some call him feeble-minded. He is a janitor at the local church, a groundskeeper by default, and that’s it. No friends, no family. When he’s done with work, he returns home—a remote, single room apartment located above a garage—and that is where his true work begins.

Winston Kemper is a collector of voices, and his magnum opus—The Butterfly Girls—is a sprawling epic of untapped imagination. It has no single canvas, no particular frame. It is everywhere—scribbled on the walls, the floor, and countless notebooks.

Winston is creating a fantasia which exists in words, images and blood. As part of his 'art' he has been murdering forgotten women. Poor souls who slip through the cracks of society, who no one’s looking for. Mothers, sisters, daughters to someone, but no more.

Winston takes their lives, their voices.

But now he can hear them. They whisper to him. They talk of revenge.

Winston Kemper might not believe in ghosts, but he is about to learn they are very real. And they are very, very angry.

REVIEW

Horror isn’t political, right? Right? 

Of course it is. Horror is and always has been the perfect medium to push boundaries and ask uncomfortable questions, and that’s exactly what Clay McLeod Chapman does in his new novella Bodies of Work.

The story revolves around the Butterfly Girls. Six women brutally murdered by the unassuming figure of Winston Kemper, who on the surface wouldn’t hurt a fly. However, this is not a conventional serial killer narrative.

Blending dreamlike, fantastical prose, the historical story of Henry  Darger and the real world horror of the women and girls reported to be missing in the US.Chapman crafts a slim but ambitious tale that defies categorisation.

Told from the perspective of the six murdered girls, the story quietly unfolds to give the reader a look into the mind and life of Winston. It traces his development from an introspective child (very likely autistic), to his father’s suicide and the abuse he suffers at the hands of his mother. However,this is done unsympathetically, as the women at the heart of the book tell the reader on several occasions and it serves to paint a portrait of the monster he becomes. 

Interspersed between this is a fictional retelling of the life of outsider artist Henry Darger - a man who lived in obscurity and isolation yet produced a massive amount of art and a 15,000 page book that wasn’t found until after his death is now housed in  Chicago’s Intuit Art Museum. 

However, the heart of the story is the story of The Butterfly Girls, the ghosts of the six women that Winston kills so that they become subjects, even scions of his art. Chapman avoids using overt gratuitous violence, but it is the loss of the women’s voices and in the echo of the countless real women who continue to disappear that is the real horror. 

The book won’t be everyone’s cup of tea though as the narrative structure changes constantly, moving from grounded realism to a fantastical, almost C. S. Lewis-like tale of eerie, gas-masked soldiers wreaking havoc. These transitions may prove off-putting to some readers.

What makes the narrative so striking and engrossing is Chapman’s refusal to settle the tale and deliberately fracturing the narrative. Mixing the three disparate elements of ghostly testimony, biographical fiction and surreal allegory makes the frame feel expansive. While the tonal shifts may challenge some, they ultimately deepen the impact of the horror Chapman is confronting and sharpen the questions he asks.

Bold, unsettling and utterly absorbing, Bodies of Work transforms familiar serial killer territory into something that is haunting and that will stay long after the book is closed