Already Dead: On My Corpse Inside

To accompany our fall 2025 issue (22.2), we have curated a craft folio on horror, the uncanny, and/or the strange, after noticing that several pieces in the print issue include that theme. Here is Richard Scott Larson’s piece.

My Corpse Inside. Wes Jamison. University of Georgia Press, 2025. 186 pp. $27.95 (paper)

A blurry human face contorts into a scream as it begins to burn away to ash. The skin frays and the flesh collapses inward as a bright red frame closes in.

The DVD with this cover image was a gift I received almost two decades ago from C, a childhood friend who I haven’t seen in years. I think I knew at the time that it had been a kind of message, like all items he bestowed upon me, a narrative emerging through a succession of texts and objects. But I was never ready to face this one head-on. I never watched what was on the disc: Kairo (2001), a Japanese technohorror film written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. My husband must have eventually sold my copy on eBay when he purged our collection, because I can’t find it in any of the places where it could possibly be. And I’ve only recently learned that the story it tells is about loneliness and ghosts, the experience of extreme isolation in a hyper-connected world.

Wes Jamison, a queer writer who uses nonbinary pronouns, begins their hybrid memoir My Corpse Inside (University of Georgia Press, 2025) by sharing the fits and starts of its inception. “I looked for answers from writers who write about the body, the internet,” they write, “and maybe, hopefully, how the internet relates to the body, how uncomfortable that is.” The porous boundaries of online spaces facilitate certain kinds of connection that simultaneously drive us further away from each other; the meaning of communication evolves—and inevitably erodes—in the absence of a physical self. “This is what these apps are for,” Jamison writes. “We sit, look, swipe as subjects just as we insert ourselves as objects into the same space where we may be looked at, tapped, swiped—inject ourselves into a community without physical space and so without bodies.”

Jamison eventually arrives at Kairo, the film C had wanted me to watch, which deepens the book’s exploration of the slippery relationship between connectedness and alienation: “In Kairo, ghosts use the frequencies of internet connection as a portal to manifest themselves in our world. As a result, the living become desolate and despairing, literal shadows of who they were.” A technophobic interpretation would imply that the internet has stolen our selfhood by displacing our personas from our physical bodies—shells that we can essentially leave behind—and casting us into a limitless ghostly realm, where time and space do not abide by the rules we’d once thought were intractable. “Your body dies right out from under you,” writes Jamison of what these characters experience, “and the next thing you know, you’re just a pile of ash.”

C has struggled with mental illness and depression in the two decades since our school-age friendship, and he texts me at all hours sometimes, from the place where we grew up—a place which I no longer visit—as well as from mental institutions, where I understand he has been housed for several extended stays. Early messages while he was drinking to excess revealed more than I wanted to know about his version of what our relationship had been: innocent sleepovers and movie nights overlaid with secrets and unspoken desires, happy memories that are now difficult to revisit. Many texts contain blunt statements about C having lost the will to live. Kairo was perhaps a way to explain what he was going through at the time, but the DVD he’d given me remained forever unopened and unwatched. By then I’d heard enough, and I needed to carve out some space between his version of the world and my own.

Last year I published a memoir called The Long Hallway (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024) about my childhood as a closeted queer kid. I used John Carpenter’s Halloween as an anchor text to imbue my own story with symbolic and juxtapositional meaning in much the same way as Jamison employs Kairo, horror functioning here as both a frame and a mirror. I wrote about identifying with the man in the mask stalking a small town just like mine, a voyeur with an inscrutable gaze, his dangerous thoughts and desires unknowable to anyone but him. I recast my experience as one of loneliness and longing, my yearning body making me a villain as I spent all my time alone and afraid.

C had been my friend throughout those years, but I do not mention him in the book at all.

Jamison applies philosopher Julia Kristeva’s theories to a personal narrative that becomes a reflection about the relationship between the body and the soul, a word used here to stand in for however we define our subjectivity, the I in the story we tell about our lives. And the experience of domestic abuse at the hands of an ex-husband runs violently through My Corpse Inside as Jamison reckons with the limits of what a body can endure, as well as the irrevocability of what it is forced to remember.

Pivotal to Kristeva’s theory of abjection is the human confrontation with a corpse. Kristeva writes that “the corpse represents fundamental pollution. A body without a soul, a non-body, disquieting matter.” The corpse’s absence of subjectivity is what renders it abject, reminding us of the unsettling fact that the body will still be here when we are gone. And in that understanding, the I becomes something separate from the physical. Jamison continues: “An empty shell, a body without a soul, is horrible, unthinkable. But, and this has been my point, this is no longer (and perhaps never was) limited to the corpse: It applies equally to an otherwise (vacant) living body. Maybe something bestial, something ethereal, something virtual.”

Like me, Jamison grew up watching horror movies. I was drawn repeatedly to the slasher, the promise of random violence at the hands of a character whose motive often remains both obvious—kill, kill, kill—and unknowable, or at least not fully explained. But Jamison especially likes a certain kind of film, such as The Fly or Alien, in which something physically inside of us takes over, leaving our subjectivity on the sidelines. “Look at how our bodies are just these fragile things, these corruptible, mutable objects,” writes Jamison. “See how we ravage them and dig through them and find nowhere in there a trace of ourselves. The self, continually displaced.” And this resonates with the experience of queerness, too, a latent desire slowly gaining power as it reframes and reconfigures our ideas of who we are and who we might become.

I have still not seen Kairo, so I’ll have to take Jamison’s word for it when they write that “the ghosts [in the film] are abject, but so too is their physics: the cracks through which they escape, because physical but untouchable; the internet, because it delivers but is not any kind of matter we know; everything that could keep the ghosts in is proven porous and fragile. Everything we use to shore up our sense of self, porous and fragile. The self, itself porous and fragile.”

As these characters confront ghosts seeping into their world through portals opened by new and insidious technologies, the boundaries that Kristeva writes about are challenged and transgressed, and thus result in abjection. Identity and order have degraded to the point that an awful kind of slippage seems inevitable. Jamison tells us that an item as simple as red duct tape is the only thing that can keep the ghosts from crossing over, writing that the “red tape has two purposes, protective and preventive: It warns us of danger and prevents the ghosts’ escape.” In other words, we are safe, but the threat is also extremely close at hand.

C has existed to me for years now only as a phone number that sends me messages out of the blue, often oblique references to films we once watched together in his basement. There’s an implicit understanding that something has been lost, but we do not discuss it, and I rarely respond. Sometimes I feel like I’ve trapped him like something dangerous that must be kept under lock and key, a bodiless entity living inside my device, my phone wrapped in the emotional equivalent of red duct tape while something inside of it struggles against its bonds. The buzz of a message in the middle of the night, the screen lighting up with his name.

Jamison’s text is wide-ranging and evocative, as arguments about identity, virtuality, and the body accumulate evidence from surprisingly varied sources: questions about the right to privacy when sharing images on hookup apps; experiences of sexual abuse conducted on camera for paying audiences, strangers bearing witness to repeated humiliations; the ethics of disseminating videos of atrocities, such as the public murder of George Floyd; as well as the proliferation of shock sites in the early days of the internet, videos of unimaginable cruelty uploaded as entertainment. Processing their own experiences while navigating questions of agency and culpability in our increasingly complex relations with one another, Jamison calls on us to confront the ways in which we have been forever changed by our ceaseless connectivity. In some ways, paradoxically, we have never been more alone, and Kairo is both a metaphor and a warning.

“I haven’t explained how this curiosity resulted in horror,” writes Jamison, “a reckoning with the way everything on the internet is catalogued and indexed, referenced and duplicated, eternal—the way that nothing is real but always once was.” The characters in the film C wanted me to watch, during a time of great personal struggle for him, have understood by its end that death is not a solution to loneliness, because the body is only a temporary container for something that has nothing to do with mortality. The ghosts will never disappear. The film is trying to explain that maybe we are already dead.

C texted me again late last night, and I thought about telling him I’d finally understood, through Jamison’s excavation of Kairo, that he’d been trying to tell me he’d become unmoored from himself, driven to self-annihilation by forces outside of his control.

Jamison cites an interview with Kurosawa in which the director explains that the ghosts represented on screen in his film are “human-like, but all the emotional elements of a normal person are missing. They’re empty shells. That’s what scares me.” And that’s the story C had seen himself inside. Not the haunting atmosphere, the apocalyptic imagery, the shocking deaths: The real horror is simply what is no longer there.

I’ll respond to C after a delay that forestalls a real-time back-and-forth, turning away from a ghost not unlike the ones in Kairo, who are always looking for another way in. “It doesn’t seem to me that we fear the isolation caused by our increased use of internet technologies or connectivity,” writes Jamison. “We are afraid because we feel it encroaching upon our self, our subject, because it (and its relationship to the body, the semiotic) is suddenly proven unstable or dissociative. In spite of the isolation, what we fear is, still, infection, contamination, virality.”

My own fear is that the past can be taken away by one message from the other side, one crack in a wall that I’ve failed to seal. But maybe writing about horror is to write into that endangered subjectivity, applying lessons learned in the body—dread, terror, the primal instinct to run from danger, but perhaps also the reminder that survival is possible—to what we’ve been calling our souls. If we really are already dead, at least in the way the metaphor implies, then our ghosts are endlessly retelling the story of what it was to be alive and how much we once had to lose.

Tomorrow I’ll text C that my weekend was fine. The weather was gloomy but not unpleasant. Maybe I’ll go so far as to say I was reading a book that made me think of him.

Read more from Issue 22.2.