Beauty With a Side of Body Horror

In Mona Awad's novels, the quest for perfection sends women over the edge.

- EMMA ALPERN

FOUR YEARS AGO, the novelist Mona Awad went to a high-end hotel spa for a facial that seemed to go on for hours. Lying flat on her back in a robe as an aesthetician massaged her face and tried to sell her an epidermal growth serum, she suddenly felt trapped, as if she were being held there by some sinister conspiracy. Once it had ended, she couldn’t find the exit and wandered through the hotel’s maze of hallways. “I just wanted to get out,” she said. “When I did finally leave, the sun was setting and the sky was very red. And I realized I had left my bracelet and would have to go back.” The idea scared her, but she went inside again. And she thought, Maybe I can use this fear in a book.

The rituals of skin care, performed privately in front of a mirror or received passively at the oiled hands of a professional, become rituals of horror in Awad’s fourth novel, Rouge. At night, her main character, Mirabelle Nour, who also goes by Belle, rubs on chemical exfoliants, such as a “cult French elixir that’s still illegal in some countries”; in the morning, she applies soothing layers: Iso-Placenta Shield, White Pearl Pigment Perfector, Brightening Caviar for Radiance, and a formula that makes her eyes well up. Just as her recently deceased mother once did, Belle approaches these treatments with grim determination. Then she discovers a spa in Southern California that promises beauty beyond what she’s ever imagined—and that might have something to do with her mother’s mysterious death.

Awad writes novels with the cruel logic of fairy tales; as she put it, “All of them have a ‘Careful what you wish for’ quality.” In her debut,