Cult Canadian novelist Mona Awad is best known for her 2019 novel Bunny, which explores the toxic relationships between students on an elite creative writing programme. Her new book introduces us to beauty junkie Belle, so obsessed with her skincare routine she finds room for little else in life. The opening sees her catapulted back to California, where her mother Noelle, a failed screen actor, has recently died. Noelle’s death has been ruled an accident; for Belle, the story does not ring true. Why would her mother have been walking along a dangerous cliff edge after dark, and who is the stranger with a key to her flat? And why was Noelle, normally so in control, increasingly distracted and vague in the months before her death?
Further investigations reveal that Noelle was thousands of dollars in debt. Desperate for answers, Belle discovers that her mother had become involved with La Maison de Méduse, a high-end beauty spa whose members’ obsession with secrecy and ritual seems disturbingly cult-like. For Belle, the offer of a free treatment is impossible to resist. And it is there, in “the Depths” of the spa, that Belle begins to gain petrifying insights, not only into what is really going on at La Maison de Méduse, but also into the deliberately erased traumas of her own past.
