Laura Steven continues to weave incredible prose with stunning and heart-pounding stories in her releases and her latest is absolutely no exception. And now she’s taking the iconic The Picture of Dorian Gray and turning it into an even more beautiful nightmare that is not afraid to get real about the affects of beauty has on all of us.
Cosmopolitan has an exclusive look at Laura Steven’s Every Exquisite Thing, which is set to be released on May 26, 2026. The novel follows Penny, the daughter of a model who tries to prove herself to her mom and society by taking the chance at getting her portrait done by an artist who can grant immortal beauty. But soon a killer is revealed to be taking down those who have gotten their portraits done and she must find a way to protect herself and those around her before it’s too late. Here’s some more info from our friends at Wednesday Books:
A YA horror-thriller-romance retelling of The Picture of Dorian Gray by the#1 New York Times bestselling author of Our Infinite Fates, with a never-before-seen bonus chapter! Featuring beautiful sprayed edges while supplies last.
Penny Paxton is the daughter of an icon. Her supermodel mother has legions of adoring fans around the world, and Penny is ready to begin her journey to international adoration, starting with joining the elite Dorian Drama School. When Penny’s new mentor offers her an opportunity she cannot refuse, to have a portrait painted by a mysterious artist who can grant immortal beauty to all his subjects, Penny happily follows in the footsteps of Dorian’s most glittering alumni, knowing that stardom is sure to soon be hers. But when her trusted mentor is found murdered, Penny realises she’s made a terrible mistake – a sinister someone is using the uncanny portraits to kill off the subjects one by one. As more perfectly beautiful students start to fall, Penny knows her time is running out . . . A seductive and searing exploration of beauty, identity, and what the pursuit of perfection can truly cost.
And you can see just how far this person is willing to go with an exclusive excerpt below! Just make sure to pre-order Every Exquisite Thing and also check out Laura’s other reads as well!
A full moon hung low over the mirrored surface of the lake, round and silver as a tenpence piece.
A darkened figure knelt on the shore, screaming like a wounded animal.
Blinking sleep from my eyes, I squinted through the arched window in my dorm room. With a sickening lurch, I recognized the spidery limbs and the short black hair.
Davina.
I don’t know what made me run to her. We hated each other with a venom I’d never experienced before—our every exchange left puncture wounds—and yet there was something so existentially terrible in her cries. Something that called to me like a siren.
Stuffing my feet into sheepskin boots, I tossed a trench coat over my pajamas and hurtled out of the flat. The night air was so cold it felt solid, and the Great Lawn was slicked with dew as I sprinted down toward the lake. A low mist gathered in the Crosswoods beyond, swirling with moonlight to cast a spectral glow over the grounds. Everything smelled of frost and silt.
As I grew closer, Davina’s howls ebbed to a low sob, and somehow that was worse.
Breathless, I skidded to a halt beside her. Her head was in her hands, narrow shoulders shaking violently inside her leather jacket. Her knees pressed into the wet lakeshore, and damp was spreading up her black jeans—she must have been freezing.
“Davina,” I said, torn between softness and ferocity, the words coming out somewhere in between.
She stilled at the sound of my voice. “Leave me alone, Penny.”
“No.” I pulled my coat tighter around me, teeth chattering. “You’re upset.”
Her hands clasped her face with a kind of fierce desperation, as though trying to hold her features in place. “Just fuck off.”
“No.”
Usually she would fight back, spar for spar, dodging and parrying with vicious words, but her ferocious spirit seemed to abandon her. Instead she began hyperventilating, rollicking gasps wracking her whole body as she tried to take in air.
Then she said something else, but it was so obscured by her labored wheezes that I didn’t catch it.
“What?” I asked. I’d been crouching beside her but had to give in to my trembling muscles and lower my knees to the ground. The cold wet earth turned my silk pajamas into ice in an instant.
Slowly, silently, Davina lowered her hands from her face, turning to look at me.
My stomach heaved, and I fought the urge to cry out.
Her left eye was gone.
But there was no blood. The socket was simply welded shut, bisected by a ragged gash from the arch of her brow to the ridge of her cheekbone. Even in the silvery moonlight, it was clear the scar was a faded purple, as though the wound were weeks or even months old.
Impossible. I’d seen her only hours before.
Planting a palm on the ground, I stared at the earth and fought to keep from fainting. My vision blurred, shimmering like mist and silk and shadows.
“Oh my god,” I whispered, bile stinging the back of my tongue.
I looked up at her again, dizzy and disoriented, the feeling of landing into a parallel world where everything was wrong.
Davina was shaking uncontrollably now. “It’s real, then. Not a nightmare.”
Pull it together, I told myself. This isn’t about you.
Except it was.
“I’m so sorry,” I all but moaned. Blood thundered in my ears. “I’m so sorry.”
She covered her face once more, and my heart broke for her. She started murmuring lowly, urgently, like a litany. “Not my eye. Please, not my eye, I— It can’t be gone. No, no, no. I’ll do anything.”
My skin prickled with vicarious dread. “Does it hurt?”
A frantic sob. “I felt the blade, I— It doesn’t make sense. There was no real knife to my face. How can— Arghhhhhhh.” She drove her fingers through her cropped black hair, grabbing desperate fistfuls of it.
“Were you awake?”
She shook her head fiercely. “The pain woke me up pretty quickly.”
“And you came here?” My stomach was gripped in a vice, threatening to empty at any moment.
“I don’t know why I was compelled to.” She dropped her bone-white hands into her lap and stared out to the eerily still water. The swans barely caused a ripple as they circled hypnotically. “It was like my feet dragged me of their own accord. I didn’t even scream, at first. I thought it was a dream.” Her whispering voice rose an octave. “It has to be a dream, Penny. It has to.” I’d never heard her sound so young.
A strange kind of protectiveness came over me. I grabbed her by the shoulders, looking at her straight on, not flinching at the sight of the wound even though I so badly wanted to. “We’re going to find who did this.”
But her trembling only intensified. She once again began praying to a faceless deity. “No, no, no, please, please don’t be real, please—”
“Davina . . .”
Then she let go, let the pain and anguish and fear roll out of her in visceral screams. She dug her fingers into the earth, dragging deep claw marks along the shore. “No, no, no, no . . .”
The ghostly swans on the lake watched with funereal ambivalence.
Fear gripped me by the ribs as I ran a finger over my own warning scar—carved as I slept by an invisible blade, a disembodied hand.
There were already three dead bodies in the Masked Painter’s wake.
The message was clear: If we didn’t find the killer soon, we would both be next.
Excerpt from EVERY EXQUISITE THING © 2026 by Laura Steven. Reprinted with permission from Wednesday Books, an imprint of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Every Exquisite Thing,by Laura Steven will be released on May 26, 2026 from Wednesday Books. To preorder the book, click on the retailer of your choice:
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