Horror, gore, and dark humor delight in E.K. Sathue's debut horror novel, youthjuice, a beauty industry sendup that packs more than the usual punch. Sophia Bannion lives off her rich best friend's charity in New York City and fills her days with aggressive nail biting and doom scrolling. So when she's offered a new position as a "Creative" at HEBE, a luxury skin care and makeup company, she's quick to agree, despite the strange vibes she gets from HEBE's founder and CEO, Tree Whitestone, Tree's inner circle of employees, and HEBE's waiflike army of interns. As Sophia becomes more ingrained in the company's culture--and more personally dependent on youthjuice, HEBE's experimental new moisturizer--even Tree's most disturbing secret starts to seem reasonable.
With mesmerizing prose and startlingly precise imagery, youthjuice is far beyond just another beauty industry horror novel. Sophia's multilayered story offers a welcome amount of nuance, and Sathue's canny satirical touch makes the novel's tone soar. Whether in the naming of HEBE's conference rooms as "the Ovaries" or describing an intern "crawl on the floor like a worm, slathering the models with moisturizer and oil" at a photo shoot, Sathue will have readers snort-laughing and cringing simultaneously. But it's the novel's hypnotizing moments of lyricism--as when Sophia catalogues the interns' abundant beauty--that will truly suck readers in. Such seamless passages make it easy for readers to get lost in imagining the slick, thick texture of youthjuice between their fingers as Sathue's decadent prose fascinates readers into addiction, much like HEBE itself. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor