Every Exquisite Thing by Laura Steven
The Picture of Dorian Gray is one of my favorite classics, so I absolutely had to pick up Laura Steven’s reimagining of the story. Part horror-thriller, part romance, Every Exquisite Thing follows Penny as she bargains for immortal beauty in the cutthroat world of models and acting. But things aren’t as they seem at her drama school, and once the bodies start dropping, Penny finds herself in a race against the clock to stay alive. Steven offers sharp reflections on the cost of identity in a beauty-obsessed society that’s willing to resort to violence for the sake of perfection.
Every Exquisite Thing by Laura Steven, (List Price: $15, Wednesday Books, 9781250346797, May 2026)
Reviewed by Charlie, Square Books in Oxford, MS
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Queer fandom was “one of the first fault lines, I suppose you could say, of me beginning to question all the things that I had been taught,” says Sen, who came to realize that they were nonbinary through the material, which felt as eye-opening as it did illicit. “I was not supposed to be there,” Sen remembers with a laugh, “and every time my dad found out, he would block the website and I would have to go and find another one.”
One of the things that I love about reading and writing fanfiction is the immersion. I don’t have to explain to you what The Force is or what a lightsaber is. In fact, I don’t have to know what it is myself, but we can use these magics and sci-fi things to move the story along. We don’t have to set anything up. I never felt like I was someone who knew how to set anything up. I didn’t ever need to flex that muscle of world-building as a writer. I didn’t have to describe a new political climate or create a new magic system…One of the things that’s really exciting to me about Rose in Chains is that opportunity to take something that worked really well and meant a lot to me and getting to actually flex those world-building muscles now. Even beyond the Rose in Chains trilogy, if I wanted to continue writing fantasy, it doesn’t feel as daunting anymore. It’s another new genre to play with, and that’s the fun part.
I like my stories to be immersive. I am a visual person when writing and reading. So to me, it’s all part of the characterization: the way that they wear clothes, what the clothes look like, what they look like. I also want it to be a lived-in world. So let’s talk about getting dirty. Let’s talk about taking baths. Let’s think about chapped lips. When I watch particularly fantasy content, I almost look for these things because it is a layer of grittiness that I like, a texture in a story, that I feel is real. The Knight and the Moth was really fun, like gossamer versus armor. You can look into themes of these things too and apply them to the story, or you can decide to read them very literally.
