Beauty

“The best first novel I’ve read in a decade.”–Dean Koontz

Jamie Angelo is part artist and part alchemist. His plastic surgery techniques are light-years beyond modern medicine. He can transform a haggard face into a masterpiece of ageless beauty. He is not God. But he is close.

To ambitious models like Jaishree Manglani, Jamie is the ultimate fantasy-a master illusionist who can turn her dream of eternal youth into reality. Until the truth about Jami’s “art” and “science” is revealed, and a nightmare ensues. Because if there’s no such thing as perfect beauty, Manhattan’s king of beauty might just be the gatekeeper of something other than human.

Praise for Beauty

“From its daringly abstract opening page, BEAUTY establishes a strikingly original mood and voice that never falters through the final sentence … chapter by chapter there is a growing sense of dread that is absolutely irrestistible … at the same time, BEAUTY is often darkly hilarious, as darly comic as any book I’ve ever read. The best first novel I’ve read in a decade.” — Dean Koontz

“I’ve never read anything like BEAUTY before … It’s almost breathtakingly self-assured, and this confidence, which is a matter of an absolutely candid, knowing voice, takes us almost immediately into the novel’s world … When a writer’s voice is as compelling as Brian D’Amato’s, you have to follow him no matter where he’s going…It’s also satisfying, I mean really satisfying, to read a novel so bristling and humming with intelligence.” — Peter Straub

“Wonderfully fresh … superb … Anyone who had a visceral reaction to Psycho may experience a similar feeling on reading this.” — Chicago Sun-Times

BRIAN D’AMATO is an artist whose sculptures and installations have been shown in galleries and museums all over the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. In 1992, he co-organized a show at the Jack Tilton Gallery in New York that was the first gallery show to explore the then-new medium of “virtual reality,” the same year that BEAUTY was published.