Quiet and intense at the same time, this is the story of a small, isolated post-apocalyotic society, in a world where all women are gone, and eventually replaced by... something. It definetly challenges gender norms. There is a sort of flip - the roles have been inverted, but not in an angry "let's see how you like it!" kind of way, atleast that's not all, there's more depth too it than that. It's rather something that changes your identity, and not everyone manages to adapt to the new order.It'...

The Beauty is a weirdly beautiful novella from Aliya Whiteley that feels disconcertingly unfinished. It is altogether fascinating, with a sinister progression of themes and ideas, but it ends too soon, and Nate's narration keeps much of the story at arms' length.In an undefined future, the world has been overcome by a fungal infection that has taken the lives of every single woman, young and old. The men who survive them know that they are to be the last generation, and exist in a sad sort of li...

This is the most bizarre thing I have read in my entire life!

I was very much looking forward to this book but it let me down hard--I really liked Whiteley's The Arrival of Missives and was hoping for more like that. The idea here is so cool: all the women in the world contract a strange fungus-based illness and die. After their death, mushrooms start growing on their graves and eventually turn into weird sentient mushroom-women. I HATE mushrooms really passionately (are you a plant? an animal?! make up your damn mind!) so this was particularly horrifying

This novella is a look at gender roles and norms, and it is unsettling, creepy, and disturbing, which is, I think, the point. The setting is a dystopian future where all the women have died and a group of men form a small society. Then ‘The Beauty’ come - a group of mushroom-like creatures that reshape the new society and flip gender roles on their head. The writing was very good, and I would look for more from this author.

fulfilling my 2021 goal to read one book each month by an author i have never read despite owning more than one of their books.

Distance. I don’t know why, but I felt distance from this story. Remoteness. But at the same time, closeness. Strange, right? Beautiful? Maybe, but you’ll have to read the story. Stories around a communal fire lead to a crashing evolution and purpose (ulterior motive?) of said stories. Interpretation. Fear. Freedom. Future. Life. Strength. Community. Solitude. Evolution. Fulfillment. These words stream through me, circle around, become. This is an odd story. A good one. Sit by the fire and read....

This was BIZARRE and so fascinating. Whiteley did a fantastic job of making my brain work on overdrive while also making me feel uncomfortable... and then making me have to contemplate why I was uncomfortable. I've never read anything like it, that's for sure!

A mixture of 'disturbing' and 'brilliant' -- that's right, it's brillurbing.

NOTE: This book was provided by the publisher, through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.(link to review on my blog soon)Why did I read this book? Because the blurb promised me a world without women. Not "a world without women except for one who for some reason didn't die", but "a world without women, full stop". And let me tell you, to feminist me, this sounded incredibly intriguing.So I gave it a shot.This book, let me tell you, is a powerhouse. The story follows Nate, the resident s...

I'm still wondering where the horror of the story was supposed to lie. This was as much of a chore as The Power was: an "ohhh, what if men suddenly weren't the dominant gender?? What if we FLIPPED it??" thinking exercise that's predictable as hell.I may have missed something with The Beauty, because the novella has excellent reviews and I'm here like "......What?", especially considering this book was supposed to be horror. Was I supposed to be grossed out and horrified by the "pregnant" men, or...

A fabulous metaphorical delight! What happens when impossible beauty ideals become a fungus that infects women and brainwashes men? More than a commentary on gender roles, this disturbing little tale places blame squarely on the society that sets, perpetuates, and prioritizes physical female beauty over human love and shared responsibility. Fantastic truncated paragraph style, too. Nice and rhythmic.

I really don't want to give away too much of this story. It's unique and somewhat disturbing. I realized that I'm so used to typical gender roles that a number of things that happen in this book made me really uncomfortable. And that's incredibly disappointing to me. Gender, now more than ever, is becoming less of an issue in society, but when you take the typical male and female roles and completely switch them, it's amazing how quickly I became uncomfortable. That tells me that perhaps society...

Um.I don't even know how to rate this.This is just one fkn WEIRD book okay.Also it's two stories so that was completely unexpected.The BeautyThe actual, titular story, which I thought was the entire novel. Super weird. Basically there's no women left because they all died from some nasty womb disease so there's just this little band of lonely men. I thought this was going to be a thought-provoking, feminist-type horror story about how hopeless men are without women but instead we get mushroom wo...

By the premise alone I anticipated something delightfully weird and fantastic. Instead I got a whole lot of TERF bullshit. To recap: women are women, and men are men, and men need women (because I guess fuck off to anyone who isn't a heterosexual?) and mushroom women neeeed men. The mushroom people (the titular Beauty) impregnate cis men, which is Horrifying, and the cis men essentially lose their penises and balls, which is Also Horrifying, and the mushroom women grow penises they use to fuck t...

Originally published at Risingshadow.Aliya Whiteley's The Beauty is the first book that I've reviewed twice, because I feel that it deserves a second review due to the fact that this new edition (published by Titan Books) contains an additional story that is excellent and worth reading.I consider Aliya Whiteley's The Beauty to be one of the utmost best and most original weird fiction books ever published, because it's a masterpiece of modern weird fiction and imaginative storytelling. In this bo...

What is a woman? Are gender roles fixed or fluid? These are big philosophical questions and Nate, the young storyteller and main protagonist of The Beauty, tries to weave tales that make sense of life. Until something weird starts happening near the graves of the dead women who are now all that is left of the female sex. The Beauty has some shocking and disturbing moments, but are there for a reason and the prose is elegant.

Like tripping on mushrooms (or having sex with them).Literally, that's the whole plot. It's brilliant, wise and messed-up.***Update: I just discovered the iconic artist Georgia O'Keeffe and I think that her paintings, especially the ones with the huge flowers, should be on the cover of this book. Her paintings represent exactly the theme and the feeling of the book.

What is beautiful? Repulsive? Are you attracted to it? Are you beautiful, or unloved? These question resonate as one reads "The Beauty." Aliya Whiteley's THE BEAUTY offers a compact dose of weird fiction, body horror specifically, in which humanity is evolving into mushrooms. Expect a mashup of  William Golding's 1954 Lord of the Flies and P. D. James' 1992 novel The Children of Men: a cluster of men survive in a dystopian future where all the women are dead (no hope for reproduc

This review originally appeared on my blog, Books Without Any Pictures: http://bookswithoutanypictures.com/20...3.5 stars.One of the great things about being a book blogger is that you are introduced to books that you otherwise would never have heard of or considered reading. I received a review request from a small speculative fiction publisher based out of the UK called Unsung Stories for a novella called The Beauty, which is quite possibly one of the most bizarre books I’ve ever read.The Beau...