Terror and Transformation: Bitter Karella’s MOONFLOW

According to legend (and by “legend” I mean various interviews, Bitter Karella conceived of MOONFLOW during a poorly planned trip to Lassen National Park. Setting out too late, Karella and company ended up wandering the woods after dark, and the forest and everything in it was encased in utter blackness.

Thus was born the idea for the Pamogo Forest, the primary setting of MOONFLOW. The Pamogo is more than merely untamed wilderness; it’s home to the legendary and unseen Lord of the Forest, who “does not like the men and the way they trample through his forest.” The Pamogo actively works to misdirect and eventually ingest unfortunate wanderers, transforming into an impenetrable labyrinth around them.

Transformation is one of the central motifs of MOONFLOW, not just in terms of setting, but consciousness and the body. While MOONFLOW is not body horror as such (it bills itself as “psychedelic fungal horror with fluids,” and, yes), it’s soaked in images and symbols of transformation, which only makes sense considering Karella’s own self-described gender journey while writing it:

“I was more or less still identifying as cis when I began writing this book, and figured out I was some kind of trans en route. It was very much a “wait, reality is all just a shared delusion, man” moment when I realized it, almost stereotypically similar to a drug revelation. So talking about that through a story about psychedelic mushrooms seemed pretty natural.” — Bitter Karella

(Light spoilers follow from here, though I won’t give the ending away.)

So if the Pamogo is so deadly, why go there at all? Because, as is so often the case with mind-bendingly dangerous locales in fiction, there’s also vast treasure to be found. Sarah, the main protagonist of MOONFLOW, is a trans woman struggling to make a meager living for herself and her cat by selling psychedelic mushrooms. When she experiences a powerful and transcendent high off a strain called The King’s Breakfast, she knows she has to get her hands on some, not only for the potential profit, but for the chance to catch another glimpse of the radiant goddess she saw during her first explosive trip:

“She watched as her doppelgänger suddenly curled open like a chrysalis, something large and bright emerging, too beautiful to behold, although Sarah got the impression of a perfectly symmetrical pair of cantaloupe-sized breasts and two kindly outstretched hands. The goddess was reaching out to her and Sarah wished desperately, with the sudden onslaught of emotions that always accompanied a shroom trip, that she could reach back.” – from MOONFLOW

Haunted by this vision and desperate to make enough money to survive, Sarah sets off into the Pamogo with her guide Andy, an affable but hapless fellow whose primary modes are neurodivergent babbling about Stalker (extremely relatable) and bewildered panic. To neither Sarah’s nor the reader’s surprise, they are soon lost in the forest, seeing terrifying sights both real and hallucinatory. Sarah comes in contact with something she calls “the glitch,” an entity that texts her on her rapidly dying cell phone with such sunny missives as “>I SLEEP UNDER THE ROOTS AND THE DIRT AND CRAWLING THINGS %@@ I DO NOT HAVE THE FACE OF A MAN&&@,” which is exactly the kind of thing you want to read in the pitch black when you’re lost in the forest.

Things are so terrifying in the Pamogo that Andy gives her a mushroom strain called Leviathan’s Favored Son (Sarcoscypha cenobytis) in pill form. Should you see something so horrible you need to forget it, Leviathan’s Favored Son will handily your memory of the last twenty-four hours. (Do the protagonists end up taking these pills? You bet they do.)

The Pamogo, we soon learn, is not empty: the lesbian commune of Mother Moonflow thrives here, home to women with such evocative names as Virginia Dentata, Captain Beef Curtains, Charlotte the Harlot, and Sunny Delight (née “the Dank Hole girl”). We also meet the scrawny, goblin-like, terminally horny Skillet and her lover, the Hell Slut, “a big woman, tall enough that she had to duck to fit under the balcony and wide enough that she filled the whole boardwalk with her bulk”.

It’s no secret that mainstream horror frequently falls prey to fatphobia and misogyny, often at the same time. Stephen King’s work is rife with it, for example, and much ink has rightfully been spilled criticizing the “naked old woman as monster” trend in the past decade’s horror movies. One of the more refreshing qualities of queer and trans horror is its active refutation of this idea (see, for example, the works of Gretchen Felker-Martin). In MOONFLOW, not only are bodies of all sorts genuinely revered, but the forces that would police those bodies into specific categories are universally villainous.

There’s some idealization of the physical form, certainly, but it’s not rooted in conventional beauty standards. The vision of the immaculate, big-breasted goddess glimpsed in her first trip becomes an obsession for Sarah, who aches with desire for a body with “absolutely huge tits, massive tits that sagged to her waist or maybe lower, ridiculous cartoonish tits that would threaten to break her spine every time that she tried to walk.” When we first catch sight of Mother Moonflow herself (who is only spoken of in hushed tones like Harry Lime in The Third Man until the second act), she’s sensual and iconic in reflective John Lennon sunglasses, lush black hair, and enormous breasts with nipples “as big as wine corks” from which she is breastfeeding a wild raccoon.

The characters Skillet and the Hell Slut are also a great example of this. Skillet, perhaps one of the most unrepentantly horny characters in horror fiction, genuinely exalts the Hell Slut’s body:

“They were both naked other than a thick coating of mud. The work was dirty and the smell was awful, but Skillet loved watching the Hell Slut sweaty and glistening and gradually gathering a thick coating of rancid slop all over her thick thighs and hanging belly. Skillet clenched her toes, squishing mud between her digits.“

(As you may have surmised, MOONFLOW is also a deeply horny book. Karla’s prose is muscular, sensual, and sensual throughout, and unlike the phenomenon described in RS Benedict’s now-seminal essay, everyone is beautiful AND everyone is horny.)

There’s no shortage of lurid and gross-out imagery in MOONFLOW; it’s frequently sticky, dirty, grimy, and full of fluids of all sorts, but the prose never holds the body itself in contempt. It never asks the reader to be disgusted by a character because they’re fat or skinny. Even Sunny Delight, a conventionally attractive blonde girl, never receives scorn for her banal beauty, only for the much easier time she has in a world that places so much value on it. At worst, the body is an insufficient vessel for a mind or spirit that yearns to be more, as we see in Sarah’s longing for a those same “ridiculous” breasts sported by Mother Moonflow.

But while the story itself never polices the body, its antagonists certainly do. Mother Moonflow’s lesbian commune worships The Green Lady, a fertile forest goddess standing in opposition to the male Lord of the Forest, who “sleeps but fumes with hate.” The community is oppositional gender politics writ large, openly hostile to any hint of patriarchy or maleness. This first gets revealed in excerpts from the commune’s pamphlet, a manifesto by the wickedly funny name of Shining Clitopia:

“Only the lesbian experiences total freedom of spirit, unbeholden to the demands of the earthbound phallus. The only pleasures derived from non-lesbian sex are those of the flesh, they do not nourish the soul. It is only through the sexual aspects that can only be known by women with women—the gentle touch, the loving word—that one can achieve elevation to a higher plane, a plane free of power disparity and miscommunication.”

It’s not long before the commune is revealed to be TERFy in the extreme, with an added bonus of science denial and anti-male vehemence that makes Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto look reasonable. Moonflow’s acolytes refer to any interlopers with a penis as a “phallic alec” and consider that cause enough to condemn anyone having one. This naturally spells trouble for Sarah, who finds little acceptance in this purported haven for womenfolk.

It’s naturally a common theme in trans horror for transphobia to be an omnipresent threat, and MOONFLOW is no exception. We see it in action even before we get to the radfems eager to pin misfortune on Sarah expressly because of her transness. A nosy and bigoted park ranger she encounters early on nearly starts drooling when he clocks her, visibly itching to take her into custody on any grounds he can make up on the spot. Sarah’s feckless but well-meaning guide Andy is never expressly transphobic, but he liberally peppers the phrase “I’m an ally” into his invasive and overly personal questions about her identity. The Moonflow commune’s dogmatic misandry catches Sarah in its net, the Mother’s acolytes caring nothing for the woman Sarah is, only the male features of her body.

These matters come to a spiritual head in the final act of MOONFLOW, where the mysteries of the Pamogo are revealed, and the stage is set for contact with the divine. The Lord of the Forest and the Green Lady, heretofore content to lurk in the background, now come apocalyptically to the forefront. People die, but even in death, there’s transformation: characters experience tragedy and loss, but also joy, revelation. MOONFLOW is never afraid to grub around in the dirt for a lascivious thrill, but neither is it afraid to reach for the divine and the transcendent, which makes it all the richer and more powerful when seen through the lens of the author’s own gender journey.

Anyway, it’s a great book: MOONFLOW is wonderfully gross, wickedly satirical, and funny as hell.