Body Horror in the Age of Instagram Face

Anna’s relationship along with her mom is vexed and tender, as is a friendship she renews with a childhood pal; their disappointment in the way of life she’s pursuing underlines how a lot potential others see in her. She is tethered to her influencer life, but additionally typically extra considerate than what folks see on the display, and her nice error is her lack of ability to see her personal capability for depth. 

Even in dire real-life circumstances, like when she’s visiting her mother in the ICU, Anna can’t assist fascinated with what’s occurring in phrases of the way it would possibly look on Instagram. In one of the e-book’s most unsettling scenes, she data herself tending to her ailing mom, hoping she will be able to harvest content material from the encounter to make herself extra likable; she finally ends up deleting the video after her mom begins to vomit uncontrollably. There’s nothing supernatural afoot in Aesthetica, however when Anna slurs “I’m a star” whereas excessive on Percocet, watching her telephone, proud of her personal worst impulses, it’s as terrifying as any story of a girl in thrall to depraved powers.

In Ling Ling Huang’s debut novel Natural Beauty, out this month, the magnificence world’s menace is much more intense. Huang’s narrator is a musical prodigy in New York, raised in poverty by two form dad and mom who immigrated from China; she is unnamed for many of the e-book, however ultimately adopts the moniker “Anna,” too, after she’s inspired to select a reputation that’s simple for white buyers to pronounce. After her mom and father are severely injured in a automotive accident, Anna stops finding out piano and takes a job in a restaurant to pay her payments. She stumbles upon a chance to work at a wellness startup referred to as Holistik, the place prosperous prospects indulge in beautifying remedies like vernix facial wraps, stoma vacuum sealing, and pubic hair transplants, the place human pubes are upgraded to mink fur.

While Aesthetica’s Anna has the preening, narcissistic Jake as its FaceTuned Mephistopheles, Natural Beauty’s Anna is lured into the treacherous, gleaming world of Holistik by a preening, narcissistic girl often called Saje. Just as Aesthetica’s Anna is cajoled into physique modifications, Natural Beauty’s Anna is pressured to make use of Holistik’s merchandise and procedures, together with a quantity of weird and invasive remedies. (On her first day, a workforce in lab coats topics her to a full-body scan and brusquely asks if she’s “afraid of worms.”) She begins to appear like a wholly completely different particular person. Just as Aesthetica’s Anna is initially enamored along with her medspa-assisted seems to be, Natural Beauty’s Anna marvels at what Holistik does for her. “Whatever I have been taking is buffing away the grime of an ordinary existence from the outside in,” she says. 

Of course, she isn’t ever fairly positive what she’s taking. Or the way it’s working. Or what the unintended effects actually are. Natural Beauty spirals right into a nightmare, full with unethical animal experimentation, poisonous potions, and piles of corpses.

Like the magnificence elixirs Holistik sells, at occasions the novel looks like it could work higher with fewer components. Saje is the firm’s public face, however Holistik actually belongs to a shadowy man named Victor Carroll. His twin niece and nephew, Helen and Henry, enter Anna’s life at the identical time and in an odd means. Anna matches with Henry on a relationship app; after they’ve intercourse, she then encounters Helen taking a shower in the siblings’ shared house. Not solely does Helen not thoughts that this random woman has interrupted her tub after sleeping along with her brother, she then decides to be mates along with her—and doesn’t bat a watch when it seems that the random woman additionally works for her extremely rich and highly effective uncle. Henry by no means emerges as greater than an unnecessarily sophisticated plot system to deliver Helen and Anna collectively; his presence in the novel comes off as a leftover plot level from an earlier draft.

Quibbles apart, Natural Beauty is a delightfully baroque grotesque. It can obtain a folkloric energy in its creepiest moments—a scary story you’d inform in a fancy spa’s sauna as an alternative of round a campfire.

These aren’t the first spooky tales exploring how horrifying our pursuit of magnificence might be. (Remember the 1993 main movement image Death Becomes Her? An early traditional in the Goopcore physique horror canon!) But learn in tandem, Aesthetica and Natural Beauty illuminate simply how extravagantly repulsive the “grime of an ordinary existence,” as Natural Beauty’s Anna places it, is correct now, a lot so that individuals will ignore all kinds of moral hideousness in order to seem superficially polished-up. In their most interesting moments, these books exhume outdated knowledge for the social media crowd: What makes us really feel stunning also needs to make us really feel afraid.