A Touch of Jen

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It’s especially cringey because the main characters lack self-awareness while sort of also being hyper self-aware.

The weekend at the house, intercourses between bunch of weird guests ( Carla and her clairvoyance skills are the winner of this incredibly strange people competition), the awkward dialogues, ultra absurd incidents they deal were the best chapter of the novel. Her mundane but over-the-top characters and brilliant dialogue add to the surreal and fantastical tone of this spellbinding book. Content warnings for some rather brutal violence, death and funerals, alcohol use (and probably abuse), references to terminal illness. When we start to get to know Alicia more, we are creeped out and not sure whether to be concerned for her or to be scared of her. To Remy, all of these people feel like they’re performing, and because he feels like he’s the only one who can see through the facades, he gains a sense of superiority, a justification to why he’s inexplicably excluded from their group dynamics.Who among us hasn’t stalked a crush on social media — then brought our girlfriend in on our obsession and let our role-playing fantasies leak into our reality, disintegrating social boundaries and ultimately rending the fabric of the universe?

Like Buñuel, Beth Morgan recognizes that erotic desire is funny in the way it degrades subject and object. Reading this novel was like being on a rollercoaster and thinking, ok, I'm on this rollercoaster, and so I know where this ride is going. The fear of living dishonestly, it appears, has made it easier than ever to justify sacrificing others on the altar of our own self-actualization. Through his perception, Remy and Alicia are finally reunited, sitting on the couch once more after using the spod to birth Jen into Alicia.The final quarter should've been my jam -- body horror and psychic weirdness that almost earns the Cronenberg tag in the jacket copy -- but it didn't hang together for me. Mostly, they watch movies together and avoid their “perfectly nice roommate” Jake whom they despise passionately (page 6).