Review: Slashed Beauties

A. Rushby, Slashed Beauties, (Verve Books, 2025)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/222925674-slashed-beauties

Anatomical models? Or Bewitched seductresses?

Three bewitched 18^th century wax models are expressly designed to entice in medical students eagerness to slash and dig into their beautiful bodies. These ‘Anatomical Venuses’ are objects to be desired, automatons of pleasure; men—like Geon Yoon—will ‘scratch at the walls to get to them’.

In one of the models, the face and groin are interchangeable parts—a gruesome metaphor.

Eleanor, abandoned in 1769 London by her cad of a lover, has two choices—the new factories or the bawdy house. She meets Elizabeth and Emily in the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens and enters into a Faustian pact. She is offered a life of luxury but warned that ‘only the exterior is gilded in this world’. When the brothel comes upon hard times, the three beauties are paid handsomely to sit for the anatomist.

Antiques dealer Alys, who has a macabre specialty, is given a large amount of money to transport one of the models from Seoul to London. The legend goes: when the three Venuses reunite, they will rise…

The Venuses, debauched for their beauty by men, want revenge, and there is a coven of witches who have the magic to make everything right.

The modern players involved in the scramble for the Venuses ‘have skin in the game’, occupationally or genealogically. Halfway through the plot—which is equally engaging in the modern timeline as in the 18^th century one—we learn just how interested they are. There are dark and dangerous secrets in everyone’s history. Alys admits, ‘I’m hiding everything.’

I loved wondering just how real the Venuses are—we are kept guessing. Is ‘Elizabeth’ the anatomical mannequin or a sentient power-hungry brothel madam with magic powers and her own evil agenda?

Rich, intricate, full of surprises and everything ties up wonderfully at the end.

This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.