I had had this spoilered but the formatting broke and I couldn't fix it, so just be aware, there are spoilers throughout. Stick to the first two sentences to avoid.

I usually avoid chromosome apocalypse type storylines, or whatever you call them, but I let the fungal body horror draw me in dang it.

The beginning of this novella gave me some hope it would do something interesting but it just devolved into more and more TERFy nonsense. Very little of the text seemed dedicated to making me feel uncomfortable about people being hypnotized and raped by their hivemind zombie mothers, but instead the men "turning" into women.

I was (barely) willing to suspend my criticism for our narrator not discussing how the woman-killing pandemic intersected with trans people, intersex people, etc considering he seemed to be part of an extremely isolated and small cult-like village with some potentially weird homeschooling shenanigans going on. He is actively fetishizing and stereotyping the women who have died in the village through his job as the sole storyteller and curator of memories, yet the monster reincarnations of these women born from their corpses don't empower them to find justice and voices via the narrative of the story. There is no twist that ever reorients our understanding of what happened. This is not feminism.

I can empathize with Nate seeing the Beauties as thinking beings and wanting to protect them, either not realizing or not caring that he is being abused. I can relate to the depiction of pregnancy as parasitic. I get the point that people in power get the tables turned on them and get to experience some of what they've done to others.

But it makes my skin crawl reading about how women who are not "true" women pick a man to force into sex by clouding his mind, after which he gets the urge to wear women's clothing, becomes pregnant, is only able to cook or look after babies, has his testicles and penis shrink and become numb, and grows a breast-vagina hybrid organ. Not because I find these things gross, but because they mirror misinformation about the "contagion" of homosexuality and trans-ness. The Beauties function in the story by having the (heterocentric) sexual appeal of women and the privileges of men, and are revealed to have phallus-like appendages later in the story. It is difficult not to read them symbolizing a bigot's interpretation of trans women.

"I am repulsed and excited. It sickens me and attracts me and my body responds to the idea of it, even as my mind tells me it is horrible, horrible... I can't bear to think of what is happening inside him to make him a producer of babies, of milk."

(Thomas--the object of the previous quotation--was also aroused as his baby latched onto his nipple which gave me autogynephilia vibes, and though I guess it could be just trying to be 'realistic' to certain pregnant people's experience, it is depicted as a horrid spectacle.)

Our narrator's character growth even culminates with an assertion of masculinity via violence.

"He has finally managed to teach me how to be a man. I will do whatever is necessary to beat him. I am ready to kill."

Had some weird nigglings about how gay sex/love only comes up as a thing that teens do ("not for the older men who refuse such things") once the women die but before the Beauties appear, and how race only comes up in relation to nonhumans ("And what will it matter if some of us are pink-skinned, and some of us brown and some of us are [referring to fungus] yellow? We'll overcome such unimportant matters.") when every character has been described as white. There was also discussion of how some of the Beauties might leave the village and start creating essentially a new race of non-human hybrids, and the novel ends up with that group disappearing mysteriously as pregnant Nate leaves with his abuser, "his" Beauty, in order to travel the world. This harkens to fears of eugenicists, that the "lesser" would miscegenate and slowly take over the population. To support this, the one character who refuses to sleep with "his" Beauty (the same character who teaches masculinity above) is even discussed as wanting to make sure to over time breed the Beauty bloodline out.

"'You're alive. I'm alive. Thomas and that thing he calls a baby, and Oliver and Jason. No doubt more of these bastard crosses will start growing inside all of you soon, and if we want them to be more human than mushroom then we need to have order.' ... Yes, Ted has the future of all mankind in his sights, the continuation of the race, bred back to humanity."

We never truly come to see the Beauties as more than predators, despite Nate's adoration of them, so seeing him leave with Bee and his unborn child as a new family group does not feel like a triumphant discarding of gender norms, despite his hopeful narration.

Also being petty, but mushrooms aren't plants, they're fungi. Support of my suspicions about the education in this village? If that was the intent it wasn't clear, just annoying.

Content Warnings

A review by f18 The Beauty by Aliya Whiteley

I had had this spoilered but the formatting broke and I couldn't fix it, so just be aware, there are spoilers throughout. Stick to the first two sentences to avoid.

A review by f18
The Beauty by Aliya Whiteley