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, author of a scandalous bestselling memoir that transforms these acolytes into bold rebels. 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, a seeming paradise, the setting of their wildest happiness and, ultimately, of their macabre deaths. This is where their bodies are later discovered, 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 School for Girls closes its doors forever—but not before three more people mysteriously die on the property, each in a most troubling manner.
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 bestseller 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 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.Black-and-white illustrations.
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“A creepy pleasure from start to finish… An effortlessly compelling read, anchored by the engaging, unnamed narrator.”
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.