nathan’s Reviews > Uncanny Valley Girls: Essays on Horror, Survival, and Love > Status Update

Being in the present—which is to say, presence—implies a future, too; caring in that moment shapes that future. Presence makes a path to find future presence, too. It shows us a life, struggles linked in love and fear alike.

want people to be more than the sum of what’s done to us, but sometimes I’m scared that the trauma just shovels into our skin anyway, hollowing us out from the inside.

For me, horror is a love language, but maybe that’s because for me everything is a love language. Horror at its most intimate is a way to share the secret parts of yourself with others: what frightens you, what comforts you, what you’re nonplussed by.

I, too, have realized that loving yourself isn’t a panacea for a world that doesn’t love you. At various times, I’ve felt an urgency to live and a simultaneous urge to die. In Greer’s work are those same tensions. I finally realized: I’ve been drawn to Greer’s work for all these years because in it, I see a world I’ve walked in as well.

Killing yourself in a world that wants you dead is a capitulation but one hard to resist.

If I love Greer Lankton’s art, which I do, it’s a love forged with every body I’ve seen laid down. It’s a love fierce with how hard it is for us to stay living, how hard-won our beauty is. It’s a love alive with the necessity of living, because not living would carve a hole in the other people you love. It’s a love I have to believe she felt, too, until at the end, she didn’t.

But trans women’s art is reduced to autobiography every day; our work, to outsiders, always reflects our own lives in 1:1 corollary. Invariably, everything we make is viewed through the lens of memoir, as opposed to something wholly original. Look at this book, for instance.

Fundamentally, werewolves are violent monsters, and that violence causes pain in themselves and their victims. But unlike brute animals, they remain human, with all the human feelings of guilt and grief that come with the killing.

What is a wound if not the measure of life?

But love and hurt do not exist especially far away from each other; and to admit one is not to deny the existence of the other.