While the eighteenth century is historically typified by great linear leaps in progress—in the sciences, in industrialization, in the very categorization of genders—the truth is that this peak of the Enlightenment is less a march of eureka! after eureka! than it is one long, tangled debate. This congress of competing ideas resulted in seismic shifts, for better or worse. Reacting to all this, the Gothic novel came along in 1764, with The Castle of Otranto, to point out that maybe the past wasn’t so far behind, that the supernatural couldn’t be so easily washed away. Indeed, the middle decades of the eighteenth century in particular brimmed with radical potential and, importantly, contradictions that eventually flattened out into new binaristic power imbalances—the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, of course, but also a redefinition of “man” and “woman” for the new century.

Rushby’s debut Neo-Gothic novel Slashed Beauties situates itself in this period of flux. Set in the 1760s, at the start of the decades-long popularity of Gothic fiction, the novel inhabits, despite the era’s literary and historical significance, a generally underutilized period for contemporary Gothic fiction. Notably, during these years contestations of the nature of womanhood bubbled up to the surface of cultural discourse; Rushby’s intent on writing a feminist interpretation of mid-century life—and how it haunts us today—is therefore apt. Despite its potential, however, Slashed Beauties stumbles in its attempts to hold any compelling contradictions, resulting simply in a muddle.

In present-day Seoul, antiques dealer Alys awaits a business deal that will transfer to her the property “Elizabeth,” an eighteenth-century anatomical model also known as a wax Venus, following the death of its owner. Two hundred and fifty years earlier, three such models had been rumored to be involved in a series of murders, bewitched to rise from their slumber and kill the men who had wronged them. Alys knows more about this story than she lets on. She knows that it’s all true.

Slashed Beauties alternates between two narratives: in the first, Alys intends to collect all three wax Venuses and destroy them with the help of some witches; in the second, more engaging, one—set in 1769 London at the time of the murders—a down-on-her-luck woman named Eleanor descends from bright-eyed country girl to jilted lover. Eleanor is soon recruited by the sophisticated Elizabeth, madame of a forthcoming high-class brothel, and forms her fast friendship with fellow worker Emily. Initially charmed by this new life, Eleanor quickly finds the prospect of selling her “maidenhead” to the highest bidder to be a much more dangerous proposition than she bargained for. For her part, Elizabeth pours all of her resources into advertising her sérail, lavishing Eleanor and Emily with perfumes, gowns, and evenings at the theatre; but her plan soon unravels, leaving behind insurmountable debt. Desperate, Elizabeth becomes entranced by an anatomist’s offer to pay them to model wax Venuses.

Taking advantage of the period setting, Rushby does especially good work with eighteenth-century London’s pleasure gardens, where she sets many scenes including the first pivotal encounter between Eleanor and Elizabeth, and which seem like a fantastic invention but were in fact the center of historical nightlife in eighteenth-century London. It is within the pleasure gardens that Rushby invents Druid’s Walk, “full of cutpurses, women of the night” and “evil magic” (p. 33), where Eleanor, Elizabeth, and Emily first encounter the wax Venuses. For Elizabeth, they are the possibility of “beauty that will never age, never dull with time” (p. 151). In this framework, their stiff beauty is akin to Instagram Face, the unnatural capture of feminine youth. Artifice is part of the appeal; seduction preserved in wax ensures a reliable supply of bodies that cannot get bruised or sick or pregnant or age out of the trade.

Eleanor views them otherwise. They are the manifestation of the “nameless sensation that begins in girlhood, when the eyes of men suddenly change and become predatory. The unsettling realization that a place is too quiet, the night too ominously dark. There, laid out on that table for all to see, is the truth that lies unspoken between the sexes” (p. 151). Plainly, they represent the objectification of women. Alys agrees: The models are “female misogyny personified, crafted to mock womanhood”; they are “macabre, anxiety inducing monstrosit[ies]” (p. 331). Yet, most of the objectification in this novel, metaphorically and literally, is done at the hands of other women. Indeed, Alys notes that Eleanor and Emily’s Venuses come with their own particular “cruel jab[s]” (p. 331), incisive offenses that could only come from personally knowing the women they’re modeled after.

Slashed Beauties offers only student (read: male) attentiveness as the reason for the models’ seductive craftsmanship. Real wax Venuses—ones that do not stalk men in the night—emerged as a means of delivering anatomical education without the need of cadavers, which, on top of their tendency to rot, were hard to come by legally. (One of the most provoking details in Slashed Beauties is the steady drip of ice failing to preserve one of the few cadavers Eleanor sees in the anatomist’s rooms.) The Venuses moreover celebrated the unification of science and religion, a strange confluence given our own dichotomous understanding. In Catholic Florence, where the Venuses were crafted in the second half of the eighteenth century, the models communicated the interwoven nature of science, art, and the human body. Their beauty, then, was not so much a means to trick young men into studying but rather the sublimation of bodily ecstasy into religious ecstasy. Looking at photographs of the Venuses, they are reminiscent of Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c. 1485), most obviously, and also Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (c. 1650) and Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781), works whose erotic nature is not contradictory to their religious or psychological investments. Eleanor’s assessment that the Venuses are simply the objectification of women by lecherous men, a notion reinforced by the murders of the novel’s central premise, flattens the models’ thematic richness. It is death by binary thinking.

Scholarly analysis of an historical oddity like the wax Venus may not be paramount to the success of a Neo-Gothic novel that also features fantastical elements, most notably a coven of witches; but this context speaks to Slashed Beauties’s larger issue of flattening gender relations. Even if Rushby centers the Venuses’ vengeance on men who have wronged them, it is clear to the reader that the novel’s men are largely pawns in the true villains’ games. That is not to say that there aren’t some genuinely awful men in positions of power which are unattainable to characters like Elizabeth. But the men are one-dimensionally rendered—scheming doctors, lascivious clients, lordly captains. None of them feature heavily enough to earn the status of villain, either. Elizabeth’s portrayal, on the other hand—and she is presented as the novel’s primary antagonist, her motivations are grounded in greed and jealousy—tends to borrow from the caricature of the spurned woman, despite Rushby’s obvious attempts to garner some meager sympathy for her.

Elizabeth, it is impressed upon us, was wronged by the madame she first worked for as a young woman. In league with an inexplicably evil witch and the anatomist (who, spoiler, is a cross-dressing woman who wants to kill men for looking at the seductive models she commissions?), however, Elizabeth confuses the novel’s apparent intention to criticize Enlightenment and modern patriarchy. Likewise, Alys is characterized with the telltale signs of what may be presumed to be abuse at the hands of men: She dislikes being looked at and, worse, “seen” (p. 5); she refuses drinks made by anyone but herself (p. 62); she experiences a claustrophobic anxiety that always has her looking for exits (p. 71). Yet, although the fear and control issues that Alys deals with certainly seem like familiar indictments of living under patriarchy, the reveal of her past turns this assumption on its head.

In other words, Rushby’s villains are both shallow and serve to contradict the novel’s very message. Slashed Beauties fails to examine the narrative implications of subversion within a larger critical framework of patriarchy. It is a novel presented as a feminist body horror and seeks to be didactic in its politics, the pages of which are nonetheless insufficiently furnished to make even a bland pseudo-feminist statement (men bad), much less to offer a nuanced one about women who take up the patriarchy’s mantle for their own benefit.

Perhaps most fatally, however, the principal obstacle for Slashed Beauties’s ability either to clarify its intent or, preferably, provoke its readers is that the murders around which the entire novel is predicated do not make an appearance until the penultimate chapter. Pacing issues aside—much of Alys’s narrative feels laboriously stretched to justify its existence—the novel’s crux comes and goes with too much buildup and too little engagement.

A novel filled with such potential should be a pleasure to untangle. Does Slashed Beauties seek to subvert its own premise? Is it trying to complicate who are understood as the enforcers and victims of patriarchy? I don’t know. Yet, as recent films like The Substance (2024), or my preference, The Ugly Stepsister (2025), have recently demonstrated, there is an audience for body horror with a feminist slant. What might have been a niche subgenre just a year or two ago, then, is fortunate to be published at a time when mainstream readers will likely be more receptive to it. Unfortunately, like Elizabeth’s sérail, Slashed Beauties is over before it begins.