By the time I’d reached the seventeenth page of Aesthetica — a debut novel about plastic surgery and influencer culture by the author and memoirist Allie Rowbottom — I had decided that it might be interesting to make a note of every use of the word “violence” in the book, since I had already noticed it and underlined it twice. For a horror novel to repeat the word more than once in its earliest pages would be more or less expected; Aesthetica, however, is not technically a horror novel in the strictest sense, although it contains numerous scenes of degradation and assault and, as such, it is a uniquely horrifying novel, a bracingly mordant document of a very specific brand of online fame.
