"The Substance" by way of Goop. A tense, gripping read that raises a lot of questions, but it ultimately felt a little lacking.

I liked the beginning of the book, when Soph seemed to be more unhinged. But the explanation for her behavior then took away from the horror aspect of the book. I feel like if Soph’s actions stayed unexplained the book could’ve leaned more into the grotesque perception of beauty and then the critique of beauty standards, who is perceived as beautiful etc. would’ve been an implied thought. The flashbacks were too many and I think that their place could’ve been within the other chapters as a little flashback to her and Mona’s relationship.
With that being said, I really enjoyed the ending; her swapping Tree’s youthjuice with Dr. Dorian’s formula and therefore substituting one failing creme with another creme that will undoubtedly fail in future (his name is Dorian, duh) formed a pretty cool cyclical structure, which I think is the best way to end a horror novel

I liked the idea, the execution a lot less. I though the idea of micro beauty influencers pictured in a horrific way was genius but I found the main character flat, which one could argue would be a way to show how little we know about these people but I wished we'd gotten a bit more of a glimpse into her motivation, in a "fake honesty" kind of way.

DNF at ~60%. I really wanted to love this, loving a horror book about the beauty industry. But sadly, I liked none of the characters, the story seemed to drag on for such a short book, and it just didn't click.

Predictable, you could see from the start where it was going. It lacked mystery and excitement, which I think its crucial in this type of story. Also the character development felt very half done, there wasnt a clear reason as to why the main character did the things she did

I was drawn to this initially for two reasons; the horror theme and the claim that it's a mix of American Psycho and The Devil Wears Prada. Unfortunately, both of these claims caused me to have high expectations, which ultimately weren't met. It's quirky and incredibly weird in places, leaving you looking at your kindle like "eh??". It's addictive, and you really want to understand the world of Youthjuice and the staff who work for the company, HEBE. However, it did fall a little flat for me due to the expectations I mentioned previously. Not bad by any stretch, but not as good as I was hoping

I received this ARC from NetGalley and Dialogue Books | Renegade Books in exchange for a free and honest review.

This book follows Sophia, a new hire at a skincare startup HEBE, with lots of baggage from her past. HEBE (focused on 'clean' products) is in the process of launching a new cream 'youthjuice' that promises to erase all imperfections but at what cost. A very interesting book, some of the descriptions are reminiscent of American psycho by Easton Ellis. I think that this book is quite apt as currently there are various beauty trends that are being pushed in social media and these trends are increasingly extreme in-order to maintain a youthful appearance. So this book would be a good conversation starter/ bookclub choice. I would recommend.

For twenty-nine-year-old copywriter Sophia, her new job at a luxury New York skincare and wellness brand is a dream come true. Finally she has a salary which will allow her to keep pace with her socialite best friend and roommate, Dominique, and a job which her mother will be able to brag to her neighbours about. From her first day at HEBE though, Sophia senses an innate wrongness about her new workplace. What exactly is in the miraculous 'youthjuice' cream which her boss asks her to test? And what is the deal with the seemingly endless stream of beautiful young interns?

Former beauty editor E.K. Sathue's horror debut is an unsettling satire of the beauty and wellness industry, of interchangeable trust fund babies who can afford to do unpaid internships in NYC, and of our shared obsession with youth and beauty. Laced with grim body horror, youthjuice is a smart, cynical and stomach-churning novel.

The publisher describes youthjuice as 'American Psycho meets The Devil Wears Prada', and the comparison is apt. The scenes of Sophia's job at HEBE are funny and shrewdly observed; the descriptions of the parade of beautiful, interchangeable interns are delightfully cutting, while the feverish excitement with which Sophia's colleagues discuss a planned range of lipsticks named after murdered women feels uncomfortably realistic.

I found Sophia herself to be a fascinating, unusual protagonist. I really liked how she was introduced as a fairly standard small town girl trying her luck in the big city whilst attempting to outrun a mysterious, tragic past, as this sets the reader up with certain expectations as to how she might act as the plot unfolds, which are then confounded. As we learn more about her, and her relationships with her friends, colleagues, boyfriend and parents, there is certainly an air of Patrick Bateman about her: she seems to feel ambivalent about basically everyone besides herself, amd behaves accordingly, seemingly untroubled by thoughts of regret or guilt. This is mirrored in her past, told to us through flashbacks to the dying days of Sophia's friendship with her childhood best friend, Mona, and I enjoyed the dual timeline structure; the reader realises that we have to find out what happened to Mona in order to make sense of Sophia's choices and predict what she will choose to do with her knowledge about HEBE. The secret ingredient in HEBE's latest product is not a big reveal in itself - the book opens with a reference to Countess Elizabeth Bárthory, and so anyone familiar with her story knows where this one is heading.

The most graphic body horror is the descriptions of Sophia's self-harming, which involves savage biting and chewing of the skin on her fingers; in comparison, scenes of violence and gore were much easier to digest for me.

I enjoyed this book immensely, and felt that the author did an impressive job of illustrating Sophia's descent into madness as she becomes ever more complicit in the darkness at HEBE's core. Tensions builds inexorably throughout the novel, leading to a satisfying denouement - although Sathue does rely on a bit of a lazy loophole to wrap up the plot - why did Sophia only use youthjuice on her hands? I was gripped till the end and look forward to seeing what Sathue will do next.

Thank you to NetGalley and Dialogue Books for the opportunity to read and review an ARC of this book.

Didn't read as the formatting of the book didnt work, had this issue multiple times and netgalley never resolve the issue

So cannot rate fairly so have given 5 stars as that isnt the authors fault!

I enjoyed this one a lot! Oddly, the body horror that hit the hardest for me was not the side effects of youthjuice, but the detailed descriptions of skin picking and biting. I found this one hard to put down but at times would have liked more - our main character seems to immediately align herself with the company and I would have appreciated more of her thought process and decisions towards the beginning.

When I saw the cover for this I was instantly drawn it.
The description sounded intriguing and I couldn’t wait to start.
However for me personally it fell a little flat. I was expecting a little more and was almost expecting a little death becomes her with the idea of youth chasing.
I felt the story had a lot more potential and could have really highlighted more with today’s current beauty industry.
I personally wouldn’t have referred to this as a horror, which was what had intrigued me to try it out.
It left me feeling a little meh after reading and unfortunately wouldn’t be on my must read recommendations

I was drawn to this book by the stunning cover and the fact that beauty horror seems to be having a moment. I was hoping to get similar vibes to Rouge by Mona Awad which I read and loved last year but this one felt a little flat in comparison.

I started to get a bit bored towards the end and skimmed it. However I do love reading about the lengths people will go to to look younger and this gave some good commentary on that.

Maybe I don’t actually like beauty industry horror? This wasn’t a bad book, I just didn’t really find myself enjoying it. It is based around a high end skin company and the main character gets a job working underneath the founder, Tree. She is everything you could ever want to look like with perfect skin and hair but there is a really dark secret at the very root of the company.

I found the entire mystery surrounding the company to be quite basic and I wasn’t shocked by it because it sort of seemed obvious and recycled. The book is described as for fans of American Psycho but there wasn’t really any similarities and just made the book fall short for me. The horror aspect is quite small and takes a while to kick in, I’m not even confident in calling it a horror aspect because it feels like more of a literary thriller than anything - there wasn’t really a ‘horror’ to the novel in my opinion.

I enjoyed the sections with the main characters room mate but I don’t think beauty industry horrors are cutting it for me at the minute. They all seem very samey and overdone.

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.

I thought this would have more to say about the toxicity of skincare and beauty branding than it actually did, to be honest. The central premise is a cool concept and surely something that other horror writers are/will pick up in coming years, but the plot itself and the characters felt so thin, the very little was done with the idea. I expected more, although it had its moments of sharp insight into social media campaigns and things like that - I feel like you can tell from this that the author is more commonly a journalist/essay writer and less experienced at writing novels.

This was fantastic and is joining my list of favourite books read in 2024
Like The Devil Wears Prada meets Death Becomes Her (both of which I adore!) but set within the beauty industry. The behaviour was unhinged yet also, I found myself seeing why these people would resort to such measures. The chaotic behaviour felt in keeping with the characters
The narrative got a little disorienting at times which worked so well at conveying how Sophia's state of mind was.
This was a glossy and aesthetic world with a gruesome underbelly and I loved every moment of this book
The ending. I gasped!

Youthjuice by E.K. Sathue is doing nothing new in terms of satirizing wellness culture and beauty standards, and it just reminded me too much of Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang

I had high hopes for this to join the ranks of my favourite 'girl horrors' and I think it's up there. Definitely one for fans of Bunny!

4★

Thank you, NetGalley, for the e-arc of this book!

I'm actually surprised how much I enjoyed this one. This definitely won't be for everyone as it's a very specific topic and honestly a bit of a weird book as well. But it was for me for sure.

First of all, I always love a pink horror book so I can't wait to have it among my other pink horrors on the bookshelf. The cover is simple yet pretty.

For the story, it is described as having American Psycho vibes and I can definitely see that in our main character. There were quite a few descriptions of what she was doing that gave Patrick Bateman vibes. It really worked well. Just an unhinged girlie doing unhinged things for the sake of beauty. And we love that.

The plot as such was a bit predictable and the book cover can give some things away. Though I don't think it mattered as much. It was still enjoyable either way as you're mainly there for the ride. You wanna see what the character does next and that's what kept me going. I only wish it was even weirder, more unhinged but I loved it.

In general, the book is definitely more character-driven than fully focusing on the plot as such. And I feel like it worked very well for a story like this.

The writing was really good! Such a nice debut novel. I can't wait to read more books by this author in the future.

So yeah, overall I really enjoyed this a lot and if you like weird horror books and are interested in the topic of beauty, pick this up.

When a book claims to be close to American Psycho, you know it has big boots to fill. Always a tough claim especially when you throw the beauty industry into the mix. This book started off like any "quirky girl" gets new job in big city book and if I had gone into this book blind I would have though oh it's going to be one of those stories, but the more you read the more unhinged it gets. I don't want to give too much away as it is worth not knowing and feeling that false sense of security slowly fade away. I didn't expect this to be such a dark horror with the pretty pink cover, the story lays in wait. I will be getting this book for my own collection. For a debut novel I applaud E.K Sathue for taking on the subject of beauty and horror and merging it so deliciously.