A Touch of Jen

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It’s especially cringey because the main characters lack self-awareness while sort of also being hyper self-aware. So, when it suddenly got intense and spooky and a little bit psychological horror-ish, the two brain cells I had left were thrilled to be on that roller coaster ride.

Then Alicia dies from a freak accident and Remy starts hearing something moving in his apartment at night.So he kills her to stop the bug, takes her body back to his apartment (where his roommate is still laying on the floor dead!

Rather than love each woman for who she is and the real moments they share together, Remy almost always prefers their absence when an ideal version of them can stand in lieu of them, as projected by his imagination.

In the author interview mentioned at the beginning of this post, author Beth Morgan discusses how movies and images influenced this novel almost more than other works of literature. Once there, Remy and Alicia try (a little too hard) to fit into Jen’s exalted social circle, but violent desire and class resentment bubble beneath the surface of this beachside paradise, threatening to erupt.

Beth Morgan grew up outside Sherman, Texas and studied writing as an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College. While the few glimpses we get of a monstrous, otherworldly presence are tantalising, they’re incidental until the story is almost over – at which point it suddenly explodes into the kind of high-octane horror-thriller stuff I associate with books like The Dark Net and The Changeling.In addition to the suspense一arguably, its biggest strength一it’s also brilliantly written, with unexpectedly funny dialogue and surprising use of unlikeable characters as protagonists. A different read than what I normally encountered, I enjoyed the humor especially the knock knock joke about someone being in the kitchen. At this point I’m thinking it’s going to be about mental illness or devolve into something like You. NB: not that I, or I’m sure most people reading this, take that kind of overexcited targeted-hype blurb language seriously, but it really isn’t anything like either Moshfegh or Cronenberg, if you were wondering. And even if Remy and Alicia are not particularly likable you need to feel that momentum to follow them for this to really work for you.