Rouge by Mona Awad (Simon & Schuster, August 1, 2024). Cover uncredited

Red footwear is a powerful metaphor in folklore and fantasy. Dorothy clicked her red slippers to go home. (Yeah, I know, the slippers were silver in the Baum book, and only became red as a better fit with new Technicolor filming, but stay with me here.)

Let’s go back to the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Red Shoes in which Karen is given a pair of red shoes as (it turns out) an inappropriate confirmation present; the shoes stay stuck to her feet and force her to dance incessantly to the point where the only remedy is to cut off her feet.  The story forms the basis of the British film, also called The Red Shoes, in which a ballerina dancing in red shoes commits suicide. The film inspired the Kate Bush song (you guessed it) The Red Shoes.

All of which brings us to Mona Awad’s Rouge, a take on the evil stepmother’s obsession with who is the fairest of them all and how footwear can lead you astray.

The title of course refers to the color red, specifically as women cosmetically apply it to cheeks or lips. Red is also the color of blood, the color of sacrifice, the color of warning, the color of danger. And the color of attraction and seduction.

Belle (the French word meaning “beautiful” that recalls the fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast, which echoes throughout the novel) is obsessed with skin care.

I had seven different kinds of acid on rotation, each one for… a different kind skin predicament. I had the Universal Brightening Peel Pads and the Overnight Glycolic Resurfacing Matrix and of course, the triple-exfoliating Lotion Magique, a cult French elixir that is still illegal in some countries–the one with the banned ingredient that reeks of sulfur and numbs your face. I also had the infamous blood-colored Eradicating Ambrosia, which smells like turpentine and looks like fresh goat placenta. Each night I rub one or more on my face with a  cotton pad, and my skin screams beautifully. Goes on an unholy red. I watch it burn in the mirror while an animal scent, a smell of sacrifice, fills the bathroom like smoke.

Not, in other words, a healthy obsession.

Which isn’t  surprising since her own recently deceased under strange circumstances mother’s obsession with looking in the mirror (in yet another fairy tale reference).  Belle’s consuming fixation on her own looks seems to stem from how her mother made her feel unattractive. But, as we learn in a series of flashbacks, it’s a little more complicated (and much more fantastical) than that.

Grappling with settling the considerable debt left by her mother following a suspicious drowning (cue the Ophelia reference), Belle feels compelled to try on her mother’s red shoes, which in turn compel her to walk to La Maison de Meduse, a very high class and exclusive spa. In English, that becomes The Mansion of Medusa (things always sound better in French), and in addition to the monster of Greek mythology, medusa is also a term for jellyfish, which play an important role in the cultish beauty treatments. There Belle is treated like a celebrity because she is a perfect specimen, with an emphasis on being a specimen, for the spa’s nefarious and reverse necrotic underbelly.

So, obviously here we have a satirical look at the beauty industry and the need to make people feel less than adequate in order to consume its products. It’s also a critique of the cultural status of beauty as well as the ephemeral and in many cases arbitrary nature of beauty. So, obviously also a horror story.

Rouge has been optioned for a film version, though whether it ever actually makes it to a screen near you remains to be seen. In the meantime, in the unlikely event you haven’t already seen it, check out The Substance with a very similar theme of the destructiveness of the beauty culture and demands of the male gaze.

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David Soyka is one of the founding bloggers at Black Gate. He’s written over 200 articles for us since 2008. See them all here.