When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror --- and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass.

The accident that ended Miranda Fitch’s burgeoning acting career left her with excruciating, chronic back pain, a failed marriage, and a deepening dependence on painkillers. And now she’s on the verge of losing her job as a college theater director. Determined to put on Shakespeare’s “All’s Well That Ends Well,” she faces a mutinous cast hellbent on staging “Macbeth” instead. Miranda sees her chance at redemption slip through her fingers. That’s when she meets three strange benefactors who have an eerie knowledge of her past and a tantalizing promise for her future: one where the show goes on, her rebellious students get what’s coming to them, and the invisible, doubted pain that’s kept her from the spotlight is made known.

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. She is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction-writing cohort, a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny." But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled "Smut Salon," and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door --- ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus "Workshop" where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.

Growing up in the suburban hell of Misery Saga (a.k.a. Mississauga), Lizzie has never liked the way she looks. She starts dating guys online but is afraid to send pictures, even when her skinny friend, China, does her makeup. So she starts to lose. With punishing drive, she counts almonds consumed, miles logged and pounds dropped. She grows up and gets thin, navigating double-edged validation from her mother, friends, husband and reflection in the mirror. But no matter how much she loses, will she ever see herself as anything other than a fat girl?