January 1, 2024
Pseudonymous Sathue (Fan Club, written as Erin Mayer) delivers her first horror novel. Sophia Bannion is on the storytelling team at HEBE, a luxury skincare/wellness company based in NYC. Addicted to the HEBE lifestyle and their "youthjuice" moisturizer, Sophia is horrified to discover its gruesome secret ingredient and will have to decide what she's willing to do for beauty. Prepub Alert.
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April 8, 2024
If The Picture of Dorian Gray were set at a contemporary Goop-esque “wellness and lifestyle” brand, it might read something like Sathue’s satirical, gory, and delectable debut. Sophia Bannion, 29, is the newest creative hire at Manhattan’s Hebe, a beauty and wellness company run by the freakishly beautiful Tree Whitestone and named for the Greek goddess of youth. From the jump, Sathue makes readers aware that something sinister is behind the façade of perfection at Hebe, and as Sophia becomes more enmeshed in Tree’s inner circle, that something slowly comes into focus. In this horror story examining the social pressures on girls and women, the only fault is how on-the-nose some of the symbolism is (“We bathed in their blood to stay young” goes the opening line). Nonetheless, as Sophia’s past comes to light and Hebe’s dark side is revealed, readers will be on the edges of their seats waiting to find out the truth. It’s a certifiable page-turner.
May 1, 2024
A young woman's career in the beauty industry takes a gruesome turn when the luxury brand she works for develops a product--with questionable ingredients--that can miraculously preserve youth. It's clear from the very first pages that there's something wrong with HEBE, the SoHo-based skincare company where Sophia Bannion works. Sophia herself isn't particularly concerned with HEBE's cultlike following, her boss' obsession with eternal youth, or the fact that the company's interns keep going missing. Haunted by some shocking events in her youth and suffering from a violent nail-biting habit--"I've stripped a hangnail from thumb to wrist. Crimson beads collect in the divot of shiny, wormy skin"--Sophia cares more about fitting in with her beautiful co-workers than anything else and is willing to turn a blind eye to the strange goings-on. When her boss, Tree Whitestone, asks her to try a new product called youthjuice, Sophia jumps at the opportunity. The result is nothing short of miraculous as, virtually overnight, the cream erases the scars from her nail-biting. Soon, what began as just a job for Sophia becomes a full-blown obsession. There's nothing particularly subtle here: From the name of the company where Sophia works (a reference to the Greek goddess of youth), to her detached, Patrick-Bateman-meets-Amy-Dunne It-girl voice, to the intense images of body horror that combine the beautiful and the grotesque, Sathue's story is bold and brash and can be extremely uncomfortable to read. Although she overuses similes, it's a fault that can be overlooked when the plot is as audacious and thrilling as this one. With an ending that will no doubt divide its readers, this novel is perfect for fans of Mona Awad and Emily Danforth. A stomach-turning work of corporate horror with a sharp focus on satirizing the beauty industry and its influencers.
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June 1, 2024
In this fast-paced and scathing satire of the beauty industry, Sophia begins her dream job three months before her thirtieth birthday at HEBE, a woman-run lifestyle corporation pushing "essential" products focused on allowing women to look as young as possible for as long as possible. When charismatic CEO Tree Whitestone asks Sophia to test HEBE's newest product, youthjuice, the immediate and miraculous results suck her further into Tree's orbit, even as young interns are disappearing without a trace. In a story told exclusively from Sophia's point of view in two time frames, at HEBE and in 2008, readers are able to see the skeletons from Sophia's past emerge, figuring out what is going on very quickly. But Sathue is not trying to obscure the twist; rather she is laying bare the chilling truth, and readers sit with that knowledge and watch the visceral horrors unfold without remorse. Fans of intensely unsettling stories about unlikable but captivating women, such as Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl (2012) and CJ Leede's Maeve Fly (2023), will flock to this debut.
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