Fungus's Horror Problem

It's not such a bad thing.

A collage of a few of my photographs of fungi.

When I see a new fungus on a stump that wasn’t there before, I must stop and say hello. Hello, new shape and color and breather that wasn’t there yesterday. How big will you get? What properties and unpronounceable name do you have about which I know little? How many letters of my name will you share? I usually take a photograph, but I rarely go back and look at them. It’s more a practice of seeing how many angles I can find and slowly looking through all of them.

In Oregon, facilitated psilocybin therapy is now legally available. A floor to ceiling shelf in Powell’s promotes books, both fiction and nonfiction (and a good number of tchotchkes) about fantastic fungi. I thought fungi fever had already come and gone, back when mycologists were getting series on streaming services. I thought it peaked fifteen years ago when viral clips from nature documentaries made the rounds in which ants mind-controlled by fungi crawled to the tallest stalk of grass to die, allowing spores to disperse further. But now I think that this fascination with fungus and how it permeates our stories, perhaps digesting them and making them their own, has become integrated with our own human systems of meaning beyond a fad for a particular species.

Science tells us we are genetically programmed to recoil from fungi because a significant portion of them would make us sick if ingested. This is what drives some horrific fungus stories like Phantom Thread, where codependence and purification is abetted by poisonous fungi, or Merricat Blackwood in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in The Castle, who says in the opening paragraph, “I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita Phalloides, the death-cap mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.” Poisonous mushrooms are the convenient tools of subtle antagonists.

But even if you’re not ingesting fungus, there’s a deeper level of aversion to fungi in stories. Fungi live very differently from us, while still not being totally unlike us. Fungi remind us of our own networks, from communication to transportation, and their subsequent breakdown. We are told over and over again how disconnected and dysfunctional our society is, despite the fact that we’re able to communicate with others easier, faster, and more often than ever before. Mold and time are all that’s necessary to undo some of our achievements. 

In The Last of Us, the survival horror series adapted from the video game of the same name, cordyceps fungi have made the leap from insects to humans in a zombie-like global pandemic. A climate change angle is conveniently thrown into the mix; the show opens with a laughably absurd narration (delivered by the wonderful John Hannah) about how cordyceps could leap from insects to humans with a few degrees of warming because . . . well, it’s never really explained how that’s supposed to happen. Just because. As if we need more reasons to worry about climate change, says the little voice in everyone’s head, despite the fact that it’s actually the scientist with the opposing viewpoint to Hannah’s who brings up the potential for future influenza pandemics, which is not just more likely at this stage, but is what we are actually experiencing and, ironically, yes—this is, in part, due to climate change. 

Infected people lay around in what are essentially large cuddle puddles all day, feeling what each other feels, until the trigger of prey rouses them from their torpor. It doesn’t seem like a bad way to live. At the very least, it doesn’t seem worse than the way things are currently going. Lest one get the wrong idea from these communist fungi, The Last of Us, like most American zombie media, is peppered with the stars and stripes and an old West frontier attitude. We follow characters who resemble a nuclear family—father, mother, daughter—and we watch as their bond and lives are threatened by the less loyal fungal networks of attachment. As they wander through a post-apocalyptic landscape, lush green moss is artfully draped over burned out bunkers and cars, a stark contrast to the grotesque shapes produced by makeup artists in building fungus monsters.

It’s not that I don’t want to see horror stories about fungus. Although I rarely consciously write horror, I do read and appreciate horror, and find lots of inspiration in it as a genre that lets us step outside of societal norms, embracing the grotesqueness with which we’ve been saddled by others. I don’t even really want to see ‘positive stories’ about fungi (which arguably Phantom Thread already is, depending on your point of view.) But given the laudatory role fungus is accorded by some in saving everything from our atmosphere to our mental health, it is interesting to see it so receive the treatment of a villain in horror stories at the same moment.

What I’m Reading

Beside Myself by Sasha Marianna Salzmann. This novel follows Ali, a trans Jewish character who emigrates from Moscow to Berlin at a young age with their family. Ali spends most of the book in Istanbul searching for their identical twin Anton and exploring the city’s queer bars in the leadup to the failed coup of 2016. It's not a perfect novel, it has no symmetry, no respect for facts or chronology—much like reality. It’s untameable, and I think I love it all the more for this, for how it evades my grasp. It also has a boldness to it that matches Ali’s refusal to be understood or translated. It insists on proceeding through Ali’s story on her own terms (throughout Ali uses both his and her pronouns) making no concessions to history, readability, legibility, or politics as he tries to find his own story amid family trauma and the shifting sands of capitalism and communism. Ali frequently dissociates, and so we the readers must also be willing to relinquish our grip on time and space and identity in order to experience what he has experienced. Most of all I love how seriously this book takes itself. No apologies are offered, no respite in sarcasm. There is failure and asymmetry all over the place and it just doesn’t care, even assumes that there may be something wrong with desiring such order out of the chaos of the world in the first place.