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Summary
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
"A delectable brew of gothic horror and Hollywood satire . . . [and] what makes all this so much fun is Danforth's deliciously ghoulish voice . . . exquisite." --Ron Charles, THE WASHINGTON POST
"A multi-faceted novel, equal parts gothic, sharply funny, sapphic romance, historical, and, of course, spooky." --ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
Named a Most Anticipated Book by Entertainment Weekly * Washington Post * USA Today * Time * O, The Oprah Magazine * Buzzfeed * Harper's Bazaar * Vulture * Parade * HuffPost * Refinery29 * Popsugar * E! News * Bustle * The Millions * GoodReads * Autostraddle * Lambda Literary * Literary Hub * and more!
The award-winning author of The Miseducation of Cameron Post makes her adult debut with this highly imaginative and original horror-comedy centered around a cursed New England boarding school for girls--a wickedly whimsical celebration of the art of storytelling, sapphic love, and the rebellious female spirit
Our story begins in 1902, at the Brookhants School for Girls. Flo and Clara, two impressionable students, are obsessed with each other and with a daring young writer named Mary MacLane, the author of a scandalous bestselling memoir. To show their devotion to Mary, the girls establish their own private club and call it the Plain Bad Heroine Society. They meet in secret in a nearby apple orchard, the setting of their wildest happiness and, ultimately, of their macabre deaths. This is where their bodies are later discovered with a copy of Mary's book splayed beside them, the victims of a swarm of stinging, angry yellow jackets. Less than five years later, the Brookhants School for Girls closes its doors forever--but not before three more people mysteriously die on the property, each in a most troubling way.
Over a century later, the now abandoned and crumbling Brookhants is back in the news when wunderkind writer Merritt Emmons publishes a breakout book celebrating the queer, feminist history surrounding the "haunted and cursed" Gilded Age institution. Her bestselling book inspires a controversial horror film adaptation starring celebrity actor and lesbian it girl Harper Harper playing the ill-fated heroine Flo, opposite B-list actress and former child star Audrey Wells as Clara. But as Brookhants opens its gates once again, and our three modern heroines arrive on set to begin filming, past and present become grimly entangled--or perhaps just grimly exploited--and soon it's impossible to tell where the curse leaves off and Hollywood begins.
A story within a story within a story and featuring black-and-white period-inspired illustrations, Plain Bad Heroines is a devilishly haunting, modern masterwork of metafiction that manages to combine the ghostly sensibility of Sarah Waters with the dark imagination of Marisha Pessl and the sharp humor and incisive social commentary of Curtis Sittenfeld into one laugh-out-loud funny, spellbinding, and wonderfully luxuriant read.
"Full of Victorian sapphic romance, metafictional horror, biting misandrist humor, Hollywood intrigue, and multiple timeliness--all replete with evocative illustrations that are icing on a deviously delicious cake." -O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Danforth's sumptuous sophomore novel (after The Miseducation of Cameron Post) chronicles the allegedly cursed 1902 memoir The Story of Mary MacLane and its link to the shuttered Brookhants School for Girls in Little Compton, R.I. In the present, Merritt Emmons is reviewing the screenplay adaptation of her book about three students who died at Brookhants in 1902, two of whom were attacked by a swarm of wasps under the watch of principal Libbie Brookhants and her partner Alex Trills, who also met eerie, premature deaths. The dead students had been obsessed with MacLane's memoir, in which the author invokes the devil to satisfy her desire for women. Merritt has been asked to consult on the film, which features lesbian superstar Harper Harper and subpar but earnest Audrey Wells, who is told by the film's director that the shoot, on location at Brookhants, will be rigged with spooky events to elicit genuine responses. On set, though, there is very real evidence of hauntin. Danforth creates a fantastic sense of dread andchampions queer female relationships throughout, delving into Libbie and Alex's history and how their circumstances doomed them to their fate. Even readers who aren't fans of horror will appreciate this bighearted story. (Oct.)
Guardian Review
"I wish some one would write a book about a plain, bad heroine so that I might feel in real sympathy with her," wrote the North American memoirist Mary MacLane in 1902. Plain Bad Heroines wears its debt to MacLane on its sleeve, starting with an excerpt from her teenage confessional The Story of Mary MacLane , and then repaying that debt with not one, not two "plain bad heroines", but a whole cast of them, scattered across the 20th and 21st centuries, doing their bad deeds from Rhode Island to California and back again. Why those places? Because they're the twin capitals of American horror, birthplaces respectively of HP Lovecraft and his nightmare derangements (one of Danforth's chatty footnotes points out that the inscription on Lovecraft's gravestone is "I am Providence", Rhode Island's state capital), and the slasher movie. And Plain Bad Heroines is a horror novel, a proper one: a big fat doorstep of super-queer terror that never runs out of ways to keep you deliciously disturbed. In the early 19th century, MacLane's (real) book reaches Rhode Island's (fictional) Brookhants School for Girls, where its scandalous mix of sapphism and ego inspires the formation of a Plain Bad Heroines Society. But then two of the club's members are killed by a freak swarm of yellowjacket wasps, one of their admirers dies strangely, and after that things get weirder still at Brookhants (pronounced "Brook-haunts", a pun which the narrator disowns with winning chutzpah: "I cannot help that the school's name is Brookhants and that it's said to be haunted"). The relationship between principal Libbie Brookhants and her dear companion Alexandra Trills is tested beyond natural limits. Those events entangle three more Plain Bad Heroines in the present day. There's Merritt Emmons, a one-time wunderkind who wrote a dazzlingly successful book called The Happenings at Brookhants when she was 16, and has entered her early 20s with nothing more to show but writer's block. (She's been toying, futilely, with a continuation of Truman Capote's unfinished novel Answered Prayers .) Happenings is now being turned into a film, produced by and starring the world's hottest "celesbian" Harper Harper (her name is explained but I won't spoil that here); the descriptions of Hollywood presumably draw on the The Miseducation of Cameron Post . And cast alongside Harper, there's Audrey Hall, a young actor following unsteadily in the footsteps of her scream queen horror-star mother. Happenings is Audrey's chance for a big break, so when the director explains that he wants her to conspire in creating a behind-the-scenes found-footage movie in which Merritt and Harper will be unwitting co-stars, she reluctantly agrees. That brings our trio to Brookhants, and this is where things start to get really creepy. Which events are being orchestrated by the director, and which are legitimately supernatural? Could there really be a curse on Brookhants, and if so, when did it begin? With the deaths of the girls, with the tensions between Libbie and Alex, or with MacLane's book, which seems to trail destructive passions wherever it's found? Perhaps the trouble started earlier, when the Brookhants family home was built around an old folly known locally as "Spite Tower", after a legend that it was erected to settle a score between two brothers by blocking a favoured view. Danforth braids the layers of narrative together with expertise. She's clearly a horror buff: besides Lovecraft, there are explicit nods to Blair Witch , Peter Straub, Berberian Sound Studio ,, The Omen and innumerable others. Another writer might have let the metatext choke the dread, but Danforth uses it to thrillingly corrode the reader's own sense of reality: a recurring nightmare theme has the characters discover, or maybe hallucinate, that solid objects are made of the wood-pulp substance of the yellowjackets' nest. Made of paper, in fact. MacLane aside, there's perhaps no writer with a stronger presence in Plain Bad Heroines than. Malevolent tower in sinister mansion? Fraught intimacies between women? Hello, The Haunting of Hill House . But while horror has historically drawn its evil life from repressed sexuality, Danforth wants more than frustration for her heroines. Merritt laughs at Harper for suggesting Brookhants was "planet lady love" - these girls, explains Merritt, got a brief season of fooling around before being forced into straight society as wives. What if that wasn't inevitable? Death and misery were once the only imaginable outcomes for a lesbian or bi woman in fiction, but that isn't so today. What if she could create her own world? Plain Bad Heroines is that creation: in this novel, everything that happens, happens between women. I'm not even sure there's one conversation between two male characters - whatever the reverse of the Bechdel test is, Danforth defiantly flunks it. Her novel is beguilingly clever, very sexy and seriously frightening.
Kirkus Review
In this sprawling, structurally ambitious novel, the gruesome deaths of two turn-of-the-century boarding school girls haunt generations of women and the women they love. "It's a terrible story and one way to tell it is this: two girls in love and a fog of wasps cursed the place forever after." Unusual things happen at Brookhants School for Girls, a boarding school situated along the wild, rocky Rhode Island coastline. In 1902, Brookhants pupils become obsessed with Mary MacLane's salacious memoir, I Await the Devil's Coming. Detailing MacLane's lust for "the anemone lady" and her refusal of traditional gender norms, the book gives rise to the Plain Bad Heroine Society. When the club's leaders, Florence Hartshorn and Clara Broward, are found dead in one another's arms, the school's founders struggle to move beyond the tragedy only to be swept up in it themselves. The long, winding story of Brookhants' rise and fall is only one thread that danforth unravels throughout her adult debut. The novel's other major timeline takes place in contemporary Hollywood, where Harper Harper, the "indie-film-darling turned celesbian-megastar-influencer," sets out to produce her first film, a horror flick about Brookhants and its doomed teen lovers. Joining Harper on set are ingenue Audrey Wells, daughter of slasher film royalty, and Merritt Emmons, a wunderkind novelist whose first book inspired the film. The novel switchbacks between past and present, examining the sophisticated subculture of upper-crust Victorian-era lesbians and the Insta-fueled fame of queer icons in contemporary Hollywood. The novel's strength lies in its quiet insistence that queer women have always existed, that their lives deserve bigger, messier containers--even metafictional ones about a horror flick based on a novel based on a true story. Although danforth doggedly pursues the novel's structure over more than 600 pages, the pacing occasionally drags heavy as layers of Victorian silk. Even so, the novel manages to feel like a confection--surprising and honey-sweet on the tongue, to be savored even as it spooks. Creepy, meta, and a whole lot of fun. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
danforth's first adult novel is at once a sexy, funny, and spooky tale. Magnetic star Harper, author Merritt, and quiet, bold Aubrey come together to make a film about the real-life queer ghostly history of Brookhants School for Girls, a boarding school that was once haunted by a curse and a string of mysterious deaths. Danforth winds their story into the story of Brookhants itself, leading readers through a dread-filled, suspenseful tale with queer women always at its core. Plain Bad Heroines is visually luscious, from the buzz and sting of yellow-jackets and the sheen of black Oxford apples to the strange skim of black algae on water and the rich red of the provocative book by Mary McLane that inspires both rebellion and a strange despair in the young students. Dark, affectionate, creepy, this is a new classic in queer fantasy with Danforth crafting a meta-fiction mish-mash of genres that creates one glorious story dripping in sapphic blossoming and gay makeout sessions. The wry, knowing tone of its narrator, the queerness at its core, and the illustrations by Sara Lautman all contribute to a suspenseful rush that will leave the reader flipping furiously to the end.
Library Journal Review
To say that the Brookhaunts School for Girls has a cursed history would be an understatement of outrageous proportions, but watching that history unfold in Danforth's (The Miseducation of Cameron Post) immersive novel is a creepy pleasure from start to finish. Framed by its fictional place and by the real 1902 memoir of Mary MacLean, a controversial best seller that laid bare her bisexulaity, the novel crafts a tale that follows three linked story lines: the 1902 death of two young lovers at the school, the making of a horror movie about said students in the present, and the backstory of the women who founded the school. While intricately plotted in theory, in practice it is an effortlessly compelling read, anchored by the engaging, unnamed narrator, who speaks directly and conspiratorially to readers. At its heart, this is a novel that asks audiences to contemplate how all stories are told. Which horrors are real, which are imagined, and which are consciously constructed? VERDICT With a pointed female focus, an unease constantly seeping in from the perimeter, spilling fear all over the page at key moments, and characters who leap off the page, this volume will be sure to inspire many fans. Comparisons to Marisha Pessl's Night Film or Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger are spot on, but this will also appeal to fans of dark speculative tales such as Mira Grant's Into the Drowning Deep and Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth.