Meat and Concrete: Urban Decay Horror Meets Body Horror
The rotten city and the unreliable body have always been the same complaint. Very few novels admit it.
Lee Glenwright’s forthcoming independently published novel SOMA is billed as a dark thriller working in body horror, urban decay and the absence of faith, with violence, social commentary and black comedy alongside. Two of those are entire traditions with long British pedigrees, and they meet less often than you would think. This feature maps the ground SOMA is landing on: the estate horror of Ramsey Campbell, Joel Lane, Gary McMahon and Adam Nevill, the body horror line from Clive Barker through Kathe Koja to Agustina Bazterrica, and the back catalogue that has been circling both for years.
Estate horror and body horror share one premise, which is that you do not get to choose your circumstances, and that the body is where circumstances eventually land. Glenwright has spent a decade writing books on both sides of that divide. A novel that puts them together is the obvious next move, and almost nobody makes it.
Meat and Concrete: Soma, Body Horror and Urban Decay
Ripe. Insatiable. Little Wounds. Meat Puppets. Lee Glenwright has been titling his books like a butcher’s window for the best part of a decade, and the next one is called SOMA, which is Greek for body, and which arrives in October.
The description doing the rounds promises body horror, urban decay and the absence of faith, along with violence, social commentary and flashes of black comedy. Anyone can write that sentence. What interests me is that two of those elements are separate traditions with separate histories, and British horror has been keeping them in different rooms for forty years.
The estate is the haunted house
Horror worked out a long time ago that you do not need a moor or an abbey.
Ramsey Campbell put Horridge, the murderous paranoid of The Face That Must Die, on Liverpool’s Cantril Farm Estate, a real place built in 1965 and later renamed. The novel appeared in truncated form in 1979 and in full in 1983, and it reads less like a thriller than a report on what a badly designed housing scheme does to a man who was already fraying. Nothing supernatural intrudes. It does not need to.
Clive Barker took the same instinct underground in Books of Blood, published across 1984 and 1985, where the late-night tube in “The Midnight Meat Train” turns out to be a delivery service.
Then there is Joel Lane, who died in 2013 and who has never had the readership he earned. His debut collection The Earth Wire came out from Egerton Press in 1994, and across his career he built a form of urban weird fiction rooted almost entirely in Birmingham and the post-industrial Black Country: cool in tone, politically alert, and permanently overcast. Conrad Williams did something noisier with London in London Revenant in 2004, sliding between horror, neo-noir and social comedy without much regard for which shelf it would end up on.
Gary McMahon gave a northern council estate its own three-book mythology in the Concrete Grove trilogy, published by Solaris in 2011 and 2012. Adam Nevill put a young woman with no money into a Birmingham bedsit in No One Gets Out Alive in 2014 and closed the door behind her. Alison Rumfitt’s Tell Me I’m Worthless, from Cipher Press in October 2021, made a derelict house in Brighton into a study of how fascism works on the people it targets.
What unites them is not architecture. It is money. These places are not cursed, they are cheap, and everybody in them is stuck, and no exorcism has ever fixed a rent arrears letter.
The other half of the equation comes from a different family, and it splits into two schools that rarely get distinguished properly.
The first treats flesh as a doorway. Barker again, whose transformations tend to open onto something larger, and whose pain has a destination. Behind him sits Cronenberg, who eventually wrote his own novel, Consumed, published by Scribner in 2014, and gave it to two journalists chasing a story about a French philosopher accused of butchering and eating his wife. Kathe Koja’s The Cipher, published by Dell Abyss in 1991 and winner of the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel, sits somewhere between the two schools, its transformations both grotesque and weirdly metaphysical.
The second school treats flesh as material. Nothing opens. Nothing transcends. Agustina Bazterrica’s Cadáver exquisito, which took Argentina’s Clarín-Alfaguara prize in 2017 and reached English in 2020 as Tender Is the Flesh in Sarah Moses’s translation, imagines a world that has simply reclassified people as livestock and carried on with the paperwork. Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt in 2022 and Eric LaRocca’s Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke in 2021 both work that seam, the latter doing it through nothing but emails and message logs, which is a neat trick and considerably nastier than gore.
Glenwright’s titles put him firmly in the second camp. Meat Puppets: A Novel of Fragments is sold on its own bleak nihilism, and that title is less a metaphor than a job description.
Glenwright has been writing about rotten cities and untrustworthy bodies for a decade. SOMA is the book that admits they were always the same complaint.
Soma by Lee Glenwright
Dark Corner Press/Lee Glenwright announce the release of SOMA, a novel of dark fiction from author Lee Glenwright, available as a paperback and EPUB from October 2nd 2026.
The forthcoming independently-published novel from author Lee Glenwright, SOMA is a dark thriller/horror, exploring themes of body horror, urban decay, and the absence and lack of faith, with the violence, suspense, social commentary, and flashes of dark humour that his readers have come to expect.
“I used to say that people were little more than meat, something disposable. I found out the hard way just how true that can be.”
Two years after an event that finally drove self-styled investigative journalist Frank Popper from The Reds, he has spent most of his time questioning his own beliefs, his worth, his reason for being. When the place he once called home falls victim to a brutal serial killer, he seizes the chance to reclaim his sense of self, as he once again takes on the challenge of showing people a truth that most of them would sooner ignore.
Frank has always loved stories…but this time he might be in over his head.
Bear witness.
Brutally dark urban fiction, from the author of Insatiable, Meat Puppets: A Novel of Fragments, and Bad Day.
Despite his choice of subject matter, Lee Glenwright insists that he is the nicest person called Lee Glenwright that you’re ever likely to meet. He is a writer of dark fiction and horror, based in Sunderland UK, where he lives with his family, far too many reptiles, and a dark sense of humour.
His work has been published in several anthologies and magazines, notably Lovecraftiana Magazine (Rogue Planet Press), What Monsters do for Love Vol 1 (Soteira Press), O, Unholy Night in Deathlehem (Grinning Skull Press), Trigger Warnings: Hallucinations (Madness Heart Press), and Deadman Humour: 13 Fears of a Clown (Abstruse Press). In addition, he has independently published the novels, Mutt, Insatiable, Meat Puppets: a Novel of Fragments, Penance, and Bad Day, a novella, Bug, as well as the short fiction collections; Ripe, and Others, Little Wounds and Other Dark Tales, and The Voices in My Head Will Not Stop.
Lee Glenwright’s independently-published fiction is available from most online independent bookstores, as well as his own webstore at https://lee-glenwright.itch.io. He can usually be found lurking around social media, namely BlueSky, Instagram and Facebook, or on his website https://leeglenwright.weebly.com. He promises that he doesn’t bite, well, not much anyway.
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