8 Skin-Crawling Horror Books About Our Obsession with Beauty

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Steph Auteri is a journalist who has written for the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Pacific Standard, VICE, and elsewhere. Her extra inventive work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, beneath the gum tree, Poets & Writers, and different publications, and she or he is the Essays Editor for Hippocampus Magazine. Her essay, “The Fear That Lives Next to My Heart,” printed in Southwest Review, was listed as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2021. She additionally writes bookish stuff right here and on the Feminist Book Club, is the writer of A Dirty Word, and is the founding father of Guerrilla Sex Ed. When not working, she enjoys yoga, embroidery, singing, cat snuggling, and staring on the birds in her yard feeder. You can be taught extra at stephauteri.com and comply with her on Insta/Threads at @stephauteri.

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Witches? Werewolves? Sadistic clowns who prey upon the nightmares of youngsters? Pshaw! In my humble opinion, the darkest and most terrifying horrors are those who lie inside the human coronary heart.

Don’t imagine me? Click on over to your most popular information outlet, and also you’ll see tales about colonization, hate crimes, home violence, the devastating results of (human-caused) local weather change. And that was simply from scrolling briefly by means of my Instagram feed. Is it any shock that social horror is such a large (and massively fashionable) subgenre?

Another real-life matter ripe for exploring by means of horror is our obsession with magnificence and perfection. Sure, it doesn’t sound as horrible because the issues I simply listed out within the paragraph above. But as magnificence journalist Jessica DeFino writes in Teen Vogue, magnificence requirements act as “tools of oppression that reinforce sexism, racism, colorism, classism, ableism, ageism, and gender norms. They are built into our societies and embedded into our brains. They contribute to anxiety, depression, dysmorphia, eating disorders, self-harm, and low self-esteem.”

She writes afterward in that very same piece that each colonialism and capitalism have confirmed “just how easy it is to profit off of deep-seated insecurities stemming from a lifetime of being treated as less than.”

With a lot ugliness on the root of the sweetness trade—and with an growing quantity of public discourse about it—I suppose it is sensible that we’ve not too long ago seen a spate of beauty-focused horror.

As somebody who has by no means excelled on the culturally anticipated efficiency of womanhood and wonder, I’m loving this pattern. Below, I spotlight a few of the must-reads on this space, from books firmly within the horror style to thrillers and darkish fantasy novels that unveil the horror of magnificence.

Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang

Perhaps probably the most buzzed-about e book on this subgenre is Ling Ling Huang’s debut novel, Natural Beauty, which simply printed in April. In Huang’s novel, a younger lady who places her future on maintain to take care of her ailing immigrant mother and father lands a job at a high-end wellness and wonder store in NYC, the place she’s drawn in by her sudden entry to privilege and acceptance. But generally, the lengths individuals go to in an effort to attain the societally-constructed magnificence preferrred really feel…too far. Where is the road for our protagonist? And what’s going to she select for herself in the long run?

Eat Your Heart Out by Kelly deVos

This horror is a lighthearted YA, nevertheless it nonetheless has a lot to say about unrealistic magnificence requirements. It manages to sort out systemic fatphobia within the midst of a laugh-out-loud humorous zombie journey. Told from the standpoint of a number of characters, this e book is a couple of group of teenagers despatched to a weight reduction camp the place one thing appears to have gone horribly unsuitable. Soon sufficient, our forged of characters is preventing for his or her lives. And whereas their opponents look like zombies, the true villain is…nicely, there’s capitalism. And navy experimentation. And governmental secrecy. But would any of it’s potential with out insidious anti-fat bias?

The Beauty by Jeremy Haun, Jason A. Hurley, and John Rauch

In this sequence of comics, a brand new STD is on the rise… and everybody needs it. Instead of the standard signs, this sexually transmitted illness causes individuals to turn into increasingly more lovely day by day. In a beauty-obsessed tradition, that is the dream. But when it begins to appear as if such magnificence would possibly come at a horrible price, there’s a battle between those that are positive it’s not price it and others who would do something to maintain the reality a secret.

Aesthetica by Allie Rowbottom

In this pretty current novel that, frankly, I’ve hassle categorizing (I discover it horrifying in some ways, however wouldn’t essentially classify it as horror), a rising Instagram celeb undergoes a large number of plastic surgical procedures in an effort to attain on-line fame. This is a path she in the end regrets. On the evening earlier than, she undergoes surgical procedure to reverse all her earlier procedures, and as she displays on the previous decade or so, we be taught why.

Rouge by Mona Awad

Awad tackles magnificence and belonging in lots of her books. In 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, for instance, she skewers our physique image-obsessed tradition by having the reader look by means of the eyes of a personality who struggles with her weight over the course of her life. In Bunny, the primary protagonist feels wildly misplaced till she falls in with a clique of perfect-looking fellow college students who’re apparently dabbling within the supernatural. But Rouge, her most up-to-date, lands probably the most direct hit on the sweetness trade. In it, a younger lady shackled to her skincare routine and clearly affected by colorism returns residence when her mom is discovered lifeless after what seems to be a tragic accident. When she begins frequenting the high-end spa at which her mom was an everyday, she finds the important thing to her magnificence desires…nevertheless it appears she should additionally lose herself within the course of. Awad is at all times an prompt learn for me, and I can’t wait to see what she does subsequent.

Book cover for The Belles, showing a pink and yellow blurred background, a black woman with afro hair and a floral fascinator attached to her hairstyle. She wears a white off-the-shoulder top. The title is superimposed over her.

The Belles by Dhonielle Clayton

This darkish fantasy is the primary in a sequence of YA books concerning the Belles, a bunch of people who find themselves skilled in a kind of magic that may assist unusual people—born as Greys—turn into lovely. In a world wherein everybody aspires to magnificence, everybody additionally sees themselves as one thing to be fastened. Our protagonist quickly learns, nevertheless, that there’s an ugliness on the coronary heart of the hierarchy that’s been created between the Greys and the Belles…and even amongst the Belles themselves.

Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino

This psychological thriller is narrated by a plain-looking, unpopular younger lady whose devastatingly lovely youthful sister—and their mutual buddy—have been murdered. With a tone of bitterness, the narrator shares that she is unmoved and unsurprised by her sister’s dying but can’t maintain herself from telling us about it. Over the course of her story, and thru the experiences of those three girls, she circles round problems with magnificence, ambition, cruelty, and the oftentimes constricted nature of Japanese society.

“Some Other Animal’s Meat” by Emily Carroll

The final work I’m going to suggest is a brief horror comedian by Emily Carroll, which impressed “The Outside,” the fourth episode of the pleasant horror anthology sequence Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosity. This episode follows a clumsy younger lady who goes to excessive lengths to slot in at work, utilizing a preferred pores and skin lotion that has an alarming impact. (It additionally options an incredible cowl of “You Sexy Thing” carried out by Zella Day, with which I’m obsessed.) The comedian itself is a bit totally different, with the protagonist being a charismatic lady who really sells the lotion at home events. But it nonetheless incorporates darkish themes of loving and/or hating the pores and skin we’re in and feeling that the way in which we glance doesn’t at all times match up with who we’re deep down inside.

That’s it for the subgenre proper now, however I think about we’ll be seeing extra very quickly! Want to discover extra within the realm of social horror? Check out this earlier publish of mine on how horror comics are a wonderful medium for digging into real-life horrors.

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