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Book Reviewed by:Nominated for the Shirley Jackson and Saboteur awards, this game-changing story was chosen by Adam Nevill as one of his favourite horror short stories: "What a refreshing gust of tiny spores this novella explodes into, and I inhaled them all with glee".
Somewhere away from the cities and towns, in the Valley of the Rocks, a society of men and boys gather around the fire each night to listen to their history recounted by Nate, the storyteller. Requested most often by the group is the tale of the death of all women.
They are the last generation.
One evening, Nate brings back new secrets from the woods; peculiar mushrooms are growing from the ground where the women's bodies lie buried. These are the first signs of a strange and insidious presence unlike anything ever known before…
Discover the Beauty.
The Beauty is a compact, swiftly paced novella, and author Aliya Whiteley strikes a delicate balance between multiple genres: the novel has the assured prose and thematic depth of literary fiction, the darkly compelling shock value of body horror, and the unnervingly plausible setting of dystopian science fiction... As the novel progresses and some men accept a bodily change brought on by interaction with The Beauty, the line between genders blurs, and the book becomes an allegory for the need to view sex and gender as more fluid states of being if we are to progress and learn to live in greater harmony with the natural world...continued
Full Review
(637 words)
(Reviewed by Callum McLaughlin).
Aliya Whiteley's The Beauty is a dystopian tale about the aftermath of a lethal infection that killed all women, and man's response to a new humanoid species that subsequently grows from the bodies of the dead. The book explores gender roles and human evolution; but running parallel to these themes is an equally fascinating thread about the power and importance of oral storytelling when facing our past, present, and future.
Nathan's initial role as the storyteller in a group of surviving men is to bring comfort by keeping alive the memories of the women they have lost. He takes this task seriously, exaggerating the women's positive qualities and erasing all trace of the human flaws they once had. He explains his process thus:
"I ...
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