NSFW warning: The following article contains sexually explicit images.
Big surprise here: I am a huge, huge fan of monstrous women. Give me women who are big, strong, bloodthirsty, and borderline homicidal, and I will fall in love with them immediately.
So much can be written about the queer obsession with monsters and monstrosity. Monsters are transgressive, taboo, and unsettling. Their bodies resist all expectations and their capabilities defy all odds. The world feels threatened by them and wants them dead for this, and to survive, monsters are forced to be resilient — or embrace their brutal desires regardless. This overlap with queerness can be seen throughout monster tropes in popular Western narratives, so much so that many queer folks gravitate to monsters in erotic art on purpose. As I wrote for Daily Dot in 2020, “we see our queer selves in monsters,” and we “see the queer bodies we desire in their beautiful grotesqueness.”
And believe me, the monster babes in lesbian erotic horror artist Viscera’s zine series Mostly Monsters are equally beautiful and grotesque. If you want to be seduced by a woman made of tentacles and fangs, or topped by a girl that could kill you in a heartbeat with just the flick of her scaly wrist, then Viscera has you covered.
What is ‘Mostly Monsters’?
Viscera, who specializes in erotic horror art for queer women, has put together a three-part zine series with over 250 pages worth of monster women being monstrously sapphic in all sorts of monstrous ways. Painterly at times, sketched at others, every piece highlights the ways human and monster women come together to live together, love each other, and fuck one another.
Some Mostly Monsters premises are light-hearted and humorous. There’s Helen and Lucie, a human-vampire duo trying to navigate the latter’s vampirism to the best of their abilities. Long-tongued licks and plenty of blood-drinking ensues, with the two always playful around their strange predicament. Turns out it’s better to have your blood sucked from behind if your vampire girlfriend prefers drinking you clean with a leech-like tongue!
Another personal favorite character is The Devil’s Wink, a “trainwreck of a lesbian” trans girl pirate captain who somehow ends up in a gorgeous kraken woman’s clutches. Remember how krakens have plenty of tentacles? Viscera puts these to good use, ensnaring Wink in all sorts of fun bottoming scenes. One of my favorite moments between these two happens in Mostly Monsters II, where the kraken uses her various tentacles to pleasure Wink all over, fondling her nipples, enveloping her thighs, and stroking the tip of her erect girldick. Both are absolutely blissed out in erotic pleasure during their intense encounter. It’s so hot.
A huge amount of Viscera’s zine also offer gorgeous monster women posing beautifully and seductively in all their powerful glory. Mostly Monsters II shows off a buff snake woman with a butterfly vagina and sentient cobras for hair (she hisses playfully at the viewer, obviously). Then there are the most simple and minuscule moments of monstrous pleasure, like a werewolf girl holding up her partner as she eats her out, miniature slug-like creatures sneaking out of eager woman’s lips, or a close-up of Lucie’s long tongue pleasuring Helen’s pussy. These are hot, brief glimpses of larger pleasures that show the ways monstrous women can be so lovable in their power, strength, and tenderness.
Sapphic eroticism or lesbian horror? Why not both!
There are plenty of tender and funny moments in Mostly Monsters, but the real gems come from Viscera’s moodier, darker, and far more horrific segments, which amp up the eroticism until fear and desire feel absolutely indistinguishable. No better example exists than the blonde cannibalistic shape-shifting sadist Sweettalker. At first, Sweettalker looks like your average blonde femme curvy lesbian. But keep reading Mostly Monsters, and you’ll quickly see her with long tongues and sharp fangs adorned across her face and body, her supple skin coated in blood from a successful hunt.
Sweettalker is where Viscera’s monstrous lesbian encounters truly shine, and the horror is really amped up with her. One scene shows her with six different monstrous genital combinations, from labia teeth and tentacles to an incredibly erect clitoris. In another segment, she dangles a red, blood-dripping heart over her tongue, eagerly waiting to drop her latest meal into her mouth. The eroticism here between feeding and fucking is really blurry: Is her meal pleasurable because it’s nourishing? Or is flesh more than just food for her, too? Given how popular vore (a fetish for consuming and/or consumption by another person) is with queer women, it’s easy to feel enthralled by this seemingly disturbing act. Ever wonder what it would feel like to have another woman eat your heart?
Of course, there’s still plenty of room for fun with Mostly Monsters‘ horrific side: One sketch shows Sweettalker using her incredibly thick thighs to crush “some lucky lesbian’s head.” Underneath, a curvy Sweettalker flirts with her bottom, who, based on the various hearts around the latter’s unseen head, is clearly enjoying her sadistic top’s shapeshifting capabilities. Then there’s Sweettalker showing off her monstrous fangs and mouths, and how she can literally turn her breasts into carnivorous maws as need be. Hot, no? It’s all great, horny horror fun.
The thing I love the most about Mostly Monsters, though, is the fact that it defies placing the erotic into simple categories and boundaries. As queer women, we desire other women in endlessly unique ways. Sometimes we long for other women because of their tenderness. Sometimes we desire their power and strength. Sometimes we yearn for their sense of humor. And sometimes we want other women because their bodies and desires and longings promise endless horizons, horizons that challenge our very expectations of what it means to engage in pleasurable embrace with another person. Queer women and queer bodies defy all definition. The lines between horror and eroticism blur together and become indistinguishable.
Sometimes the scariest things are also the things we long for the most. Anyone who has ever grappled with anxiety around their own queerness knows that. Mostly Monsters just makes it clear that when you finally embrace the things that scare you the most, pure bliss is on the other side.
(Featured image: Viscera)
