Between bioengineering nightmares, somatic horror, and the artificial flesh of maternal memory

There is a subtly necrotic and deeply disturbing drive running through Leah Hayes’s work in Identical, published by Fantagraphics and available now. In an era saturated with sanitized or technocratic narratives about Artificial Intelligence, Hayes performs an almost surgical, visceral gesture: she strips away the myth of humanity and technology to reduce it to an emotional autopsy, a raw parable on the imperfections of flesh and code.

Identical operates within a brutal minimalism, almost fatalistic in its trajectory toward inevitable ruin. From its striking premise, the confession that the twins live in a closeness so symbiotic it makes everyone else appear tragically “alone”, Hayes sets up a narrative device somewhere between intimate drama and somatic nightmare.

The mother’s story, a single writer turned away by traditional fertility clinics, quickly becomes a Faustian pact with a self-proclaimed doctor, Dr. Simon. There is an almost clinical cynicism in the introduction of the artificial egg: life is not generated as a sacred act, but inoculated like a virus by a ruthless bioengineer testing the biological integration of AI within the human matrix.

We implanted one artificial egg and one human egg, because we were certain they would not both survive. But apparently they did.”

Out of this maternal refusal of abortion, the horror of daily life takes root. Hayes refuses to tell us which twin is human and which is the synthetic construct, and it is in this uncertainty that the beating heart of the book lies. The reader becomes a pathologist forced to search for microscopic clues among the folds of the narrative: the exhausting 38-hour labor in which one infant is born blue and screaming, starved of air, while the other enters the world pink, perfectly calm, unnaturally silent.

The story’s progression carries an undercurrent of tension reminiscent of David Cronenberg’s bodily hallucinations, condensed into an essential, almost naive visual style. The extreme rage attacks (“brain attacks”), the sleepwalking, the emotional dysfunction, and the psychosomatic manifestations are not mere character traits, but the short circuit of a system trying to process the irrational complexity of human pain.

Who is the real child? The one with uncontrollable rage, or the one who is frighteningly compliant? Hayes brilliantly overturns narrative convention: the machine is not rigid and cold, but becomes a ticking bomb of neurosis and obsessive itching.

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