A Touch of Jen

Product Information

Emily Temple, LITERARY HUB --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Remy and Alicia are an unglamorous New York couple living with a nice roommate they hate and working unfulfilling jobs in food service. When private citizens conduct their lives in public, posing and pleading for our attention, who can blame us for watching, for liking, for indulging in the abundant supply of their influence? It doesn't matter if you're into Stephen King, Octavia Butler, Jack Ketchum or Shirley Jackson, this is the place to share that love and discuss to your heart's content.

By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. The way the dialogue is written, the blunt and ambivalent attitudes of Remy and Alicia, every interaction and every scene has a slight unsettling nature to it.

We never really understand why they’re so obsessed, Alicia especially, but that’s not the important part.

Much like Alicia mimicking Jen’s appearance and mannerisms, Alicia persuades herself and others that if she keeps trying, she can actualize her visions. But some of it is woven in very naturally through this self-help book that gets passed between the characters and referenced more and more. B. Fisketjon, “a healer, lifestyle expert, and spiritual counselor,” the book describes manifesting the energy of the universe to become the ultimate version of yourself.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. And even if Remy and Alicia are not particularly likable you need to feel that momentum to follow them for this to really work for you. I felt like I was trapped in a universe created by corporation of David Cronenberg , Terry Gilliam, Alex Garland and Charlie Kaufman.

Content warnings for some rather brutal violence, death and funerals, alcohol use (and probably abuse), references to terminal illness. The humor is dark, you never get a reprieve from the unsettling tone, the psychedelic horror element is incredibly bizarre, and the interactions between and ruthless examination of the characters behaviors is uncomfortable and often unfortunately relatable (to me anyway).

What we don’t recognize is that all these little details一words we overhear or images we see in our dreams一are Signifiers of this universal energy. She still believes in reaching an essential part of herself through discipline: If she does everything right, she’ll find her way to some mystical nugget…a form in which her beauty is self-evident, her destiny clear, her neuroses shriveled and fallen away. This is the relatable conundrum faced by the central characters of “A Touch of Jen,” a satirical, ferocious, shape-shifting novel from the debut author Beth Morgan, a current M.

Boy oh boy, I was NOT expecting this weird and crazy, horrifying, bizarre literarly thrill ride when I first started what seemed like an innocuous book about a couple's off-kilter obsession with an Instagram influencer they vaguely know. Mostly, they watch movies together and avoid their “perfectly nice roommate” Jake whom they despise passionately (page 6). In an interview with The Rumpus, she stated that this came from her desire to “portray the absurdity and self-absorption of the personal journey or the hero’s journey. Having also been inspired while on the trip to build her spod–essentially an enclosed hot tub, much like a sense deprivation chamber or dark, warm, womb-like vessel–Alicia begins bringing her idea to life, unencumbered by the pressure of perfection and constantly reassuring herself and others that this is just a prototype. While A Touch of Jen starts as a typical millennial literary realist novel, in the second half it becomes a full-blown horror novel featuring plenty of “stylized violence,” as Remy would say.After all, though The Apple Bush sounds hokey and contrived, its philosophies within this novel prove to be real and catastrophic in their sincerity.