“If a photograph could slice a little flesh from time, did the rest of the carcass remain? Could she return and suck the lingering taste off of the cracked and splintered bones?

Is that why Bartok made the movie? So he’d have somewhere to go after he died?”

Gretchen Felker-Martin is one of modern horror’s key architects. Manhunt (2022) and Cuckoo (2024) are masterpieces of modern body horror, that combine splatterpunk thrills with razor-sharp social commentary. Black Flame (2025) continues Felker-Martin’s awesome reign of terror, whilst breaking exciting new ground. Felker-Martin is one of the US’s most eloquent film critics, so it makes perfect sense that she would write a novel about film. Black Flame is a love letter to the rich history of transgressive cinema, from The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920) to The Thing (1982). It’s a celebration of queerness and a rejection of fascism. It’s Felker-Martin’s most focused and mature work to date, and demonstrates just how remarkably in control she is over her material.

Ellen Kramer is deeply closeted and since ending her affair with trans woman Freddie, her overbearing mother and her profoundly unhappy father just want her to find a nice man, get married and quit her job as a film archivist, like a good Jewish New Yorker woman. Her future seems to have nothing more exciting in it than suffering through her intense self-loathing, being patrosnised by the men she works with, and disappointing sex with drab young men like Jesse that her mother sets her up with. But her life begins to unravel when The Baroness, a black and white exploitation film thought destroyed by the Nazis, arrives on Ellen’s desk. Filmed in 1930s Germany by director Karla Bartok, The Baron is transgressively queer and hedonistic, and awakens all the feelings Ellen thought she had successfully repressed. This is exacerbated by Ellen’s undeniable attraction to film critic Rachel, who wants to see a screening of the film and is very much part of the queer world that Ellen has rejected. The film is getting under Ellen’s skin in other ways too, as Ellen’s sense of the boundary between reality and fantasy begins to dissolve. Are the grotesque figures from the film haunting her waking life? Ellen begins to realise too late that perhaps it is not the darkly erotic vision of Bartok that she needs to be frightened of, but the stultifying heteronormativity that has led her to reject everything that might save her.

Firstly let me reassure fans of Felker-Martin’s earlier work who might be worried that Black Flame’s smaller canvas and more grounded setting means that she’s dialing back the body horror. Black Flame may be more of a slow burn than Manhunt or Cuckoo, but it builds to a deliriously transgressive conclusion that would make Clive Barker blush. Felker-Martin is in no danger of mellowing out. And the novel is just as politically engaged as her earlier work. The reduced cast compared to her earlier novels, and more mundane setting, allows Felker-Martin’s character work to shine through like never before. Ellen is someone who has been deeply hurt by the homophobic society that she has grown up in, and her privilege coming from a rich family leads her to act remarkably selfishly and destructively towards Freddie and the others that she should recognize as her queer community but is too closeted and wracked with self-loathing to embrace. The Baroness speak to the part of her deep inside that recognizes that the heteronormative culture she’s been forced into is bullshit, and its celebration of transgression and queerness ultimately becomes emancipatory. 

This is a throughline in the novel, how transgressive art can celebrate queerness and give a lifeline to those who need it. Felker-Martin’s own passionate and eloquent film criticism frequently celebrates this aspect of transgressive cinema, and Black Flame allows her to deploy her passion and knowledge to powerful effect. The novel is full of allusions to the history of transgressive cinema, some of them explicit, like when Ellen escapes her dreary life to masturbate to The Thing in a cinema, but many of them baked into the novel’s premise. There are plenty of deep cuts for enthusiasts to pick up on. From its description, The Baroness seems to combine elements of the dark fairytale surrealness of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, one of the earliest horror films with the disturbing psychological horror of later works like Carnival of Souls (1962) and the grotesquerie of Todd Browning’s Freaks (1932). There’s some of the dense symbolism of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) in there as well. As such it’s able to symbolise a history of transgressive cinema through which outsider artists and film fans have been able to express and see themselves in spite of a conservative mainstream culture. Felker-Martin’s celebration of this form of art reminds us of how vital transgressive art is in providing alternative perspectives and giving a voice to outsiders. 

Black Flame is a brilliant and compelling work of horror from one of the genre’s modern masters. Watching Felker-Martin develop as an artist has been incredible – with each successive work she outdoes herself. This novel sees her at the height of her powers, mixing body horror with psychological depth and a profound insight into the workings of queer culture. I can’t wait to read what she writes next. 

Black Flame is due for release 4th November from Titan Books. You can pre-order your copy on Bookshop.org