literature Tag

Body horror in The SubstanceGallery / 19 images In Sarah Wang’s debut novel New Skin, a Chinese immigrant mother in Los Angeles spends her benefit payments on backstreet cosmetic procedures. When things go catastrophically awry, her daughter discovers that some of the substances being illegally injected into faces would be more at home on building sites.  Wang, who researched the novel partly through immersion in the American reality show Botched, which documents cosmetic surgery disasters, found the truth required little embellishment. She describes women who woke from surgery to find procedures had been performed on them without consent. Meanwhile, a surgeon whose practice consisted almost entirely of debriding flesh rotted by Brazilian butt lifts told her that most get botched. The UK, too,...