A Touch Of Horror

A case for Beth Morgan's A Touch of Jen as a spooky October read.

Spoilers ahead, btw.

Once you share your life online, you can never get it back. You open yourself up to the (allegedly) dreaded notion of “being perceived” from people who feel nothing about you, who admire you, who hate you, and sometimes, if you’re particularly unlucky, those who want to be you. 

It’s a scary notion — but it’s October, which is famously the best time to scare and be scared. Social media-fueled obsessions are not uncommon in contemporary literature, but I always find my mind wandering back to Beth Morgan’s 2021 debut A Touch of Jen whenever I think about people being absolute freaks about the fantasy and projection of the Curated Self to the point of disaster. 

The novel follows Remy and Alicia, a couple who should have broken up months ago. He’s cruel, she’s insecure, and they’re deeply unhappy together. They have little holding them together, save for their mutual obsession: Remy’s former co-worker, Jen. They stalk her feed and memorize her captions; they know her entire “journey” toward her “best self” courtesy of her favorite New Age text The Apple Bush as if it were their own. The novel’s opening sentence brutally sets the scene: “Alicia says that maybe she should print out a photo of Jen’s face and tape it over her own while they have sex.”

Morgan’s novel takes an unexpected turn into horror (I’m circling back to “October” as a “concept” btw) when the obsession takes a physical form: first, with Alicia slowly morphing herself into Jen before tragically dying in a bike accident; then, with the arrival of an interdimensional, Cronenberg-esque monster that strangely resembles Jen. Remy’s obsession has had more consequences than him just being a capital-L loser; it’s actualized as a FMTA (Fully Manifested Toxic Antagonist) that he must take down.

There’s a lot going on in A Touch of Jen — the tragedy of heterosexual couples, spiritual satire, being a little too broke for comfort in Brooklyn — but its propulsive eeriness is what’s stayed with me through the years. I think of Remy, Alicia, and Jen whenever I find myself screenshotting someone’s story so I can zoom in on the background or when someone pathologizes an innocent shitpost. What’s spookier than that?