The Beauty by Aliya Whitely Review (Novella, 2014)
Content warning: sexual content, mental wellness, grieving, gender identity, violence against women, child loss, medical/surgical scenes
In the future, there are no women left. They have all succumb to a mysterious disease that causes them to form yellow fungus-like growths all over their bodies. The memories of the before times are told nightly around the fire by Nate, a creative young man whose only experience with womanhood began and ended with his mother.
Aliya Whitely is a modern master of psychological body horror. Her work is as beautiful as it is disturbing. When she chooses to create a world like and unlike our own, even the similarities feel unreal. The society of The Beauty clearly comes from our own, but it a nightmarish world of destruction as the end of humanity ticks away day by day.
Nate is a compelling narrator. The storyteller conceit allows Whitely to switch between Nate’s experience of day to day life and the performative storytelling in the form of original fairy tales meant to reflect on the past and teach lessons for the future. As the potential future of the world develops, Nate is the one to make it his goal to embrace the small sliver of hope at any cost.
That cost is a confrontation with grief, memory, and body horror. The Beauty is the name of a new humanoid species discovered by Nate and integrated into society. These creatures are made of yellow mushrooms, but shaped like human women. They communicate through hums and telepathic images, claiming their own man to care for.
The Beauty is a novella of the past vs the future. Tension already exists because of generational differences. Without the women in their lives to mediate conflict over new ideas and different ways of life, the remaining men of the world have developed a harmful society of toxic masculinity. Men have to be real men, and real men are valued for their physical contributions to society. Young men like Nate who take on more creative or domestic roles are barely tolerated out of convenience.
The emergence of The Beauty breaks any sense of stability, even for the older generation. They lived with women. They had mothers, wives, and daughters in their longer lives. They have far stronger memories of each woman in their community being overtaken by the disease no matter how hard they tried to save them. These womanly bodies can never replace the women they lost, but their own acquiescence to macho stereotypes prevents them from sharing their real feelings.
The younger generation is more open to The Beauty. They know from the older generations that, if women still existed, they would have to find wives and start their own families. The Beauty give them some semblance of their predestined roles as husbands and providers. The Beauty make them feel good and love them without asking, so who are they to question it?
The Beauty is one of the most captivating horror novellas I’ve ever encountered. Whiteley’s prose is calm and even. It’s easy to keep turning the page even as the events turn darker and more violent. The novella is filled with twists that push you to go deeper, even as it turns into one of the most bizarre sequences of body horror I’ve ever seen. The Beauty has haunted my waking thoughts and nightmares for over a week and I still want to toughen up and dig further into this apocalypse.
The Beauty is available in paperback and ebook editions.
