Book Review: ‘Youthjuice’ by EK Sathue (millennial body horror)
I’m on a serious literary horror trip right now, and I particularly love body horror and when it collides with the beauty industry. There’s something about the visceral horror of your body changing in a way that feels totally out of control that’s familiar to everyone who survived puberty, and crushing horrors of social pressure on a woman’s body that she battles against every single day clash in these novels in the most wonderfully cleansing way.
‘Youthjuice’ by SK Sathue appeared on my radar because of the cover and I requested it on NetGalley before I made it halfway through the synopsis. Luckily for me, it absolutely lived up to my expectations.
A 29-year-old copywriter realises that beauty is possible - at a terrible cost - in this surreal, satirical send-up of NYC It-girl culture.
From Sophia Bannon's first day on the Storytelling team at HEBE, a luxury skincare/wellness company based in New York City's glitziest neighbourhood, it's clear something is deeply amiss. But Sophia, pushing thirty with plenty of skeletons in her closet next to the designer knock-offs, doesn't care. Though she leads an outwardly charmed life, she aches for a deeper meaning to her flat existence - and a cure for her brutal nail-biting habit. She finds it all and more at HEBE, and with Tree Whitestone, HEBE's charismatic, sinister founder and CEO.
Soon Sophia is addicted to her HEBE lifestyle, especially youthjuice, the fatty, soothing moisturiser Tree has selected Sophia to test in top secret. But the unsustainability of HEBE's system is rapidly growing apparent, and Sophia is going to have to decide how far she's willing to go to stay beautiful forever...
Glittering with ominous flashes of Sophia's coming-of-rage story, former beauty editor E.K. Sathue's horror debut is as hilarious as it is stomach-churning in its portrayal of literally all-consuming female friendship and capitalism's short attention span. You'll never moisturise the same way again.
If you’ve enjoyed ‘Chlorine’ by Jade Song or ‘Natural Beauty’ by Ling Ling Huang then ‘Youthjuice’ should be on your radar.
This novel really condensed the icky feeling of the online beauty industry for me. The influencers that looks so perfect they must be filtered to high heaven, even though they swear they aren’t, and use endless reels and stories to promote beauty projects with a price tag equalling my monthly grocery bill. They make me uncomfortable, and yet I yearn for those products and the flawlessness of these women - there’s very much the feeling that I would genuinely consider selling my soul for eternal beauty, and that’s what these novels take on, and ‘Youthjuice’ does it with aplomb.
Sophia quickly becomes taken in by the world of HEBE, their miraculous projects, and the CEO, Tree, who is every ethereal-seeming beauty goddess you’ve ever stumbled across. Once she is accepted and appreciated as part of the team (to be involved in a big, groundbreaking secret, heralded by incredible women is the dream), and she learns the secrets of HEBE, she’s able to push them to the side because of this incredible new life she’s experiencing under their tuition and guidance.
The unhinged woman has been a staple of literary fiction for a while now, and I feel like this unhinged woman literary horror is the natural next step to that. It’s pushing the envelope even further and allowing even more room for women’s to explore and criticise the way that the world around them attempts to shape, reduce and dampen them.
I’m all in on this genre and I loved reading ‘Youthjuice’. The threatening and sinister undertone of the novel was pitch-perfect, and though I would have liked a little more depth to the character development, this delivered exactly what I hoped it would.
Thank you to Renegade Books and NetGalley for the review copy.
Written by Sophie
