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 …
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.
Not a style I like.
For how long this book is, it was a breeze to read. It’s also slow, but I never really felt bored or bogged down. I enjoyed it even when I didn’t know where it was going.
The scary bits I liked the most were the unsettling ones, like the yellow jacket swarm on the road with the apples, and all the times someone accidentally ate a bug. That might have only been 2 times but it was so awful
Wunderschön, gruselig, very gay.
This just didn’t work for me. I can see why it should—I like gothic books, I like haunted books, I like riffing off history to make fiction, I like queer women. And yet!! I blame the arch narrator and her annoying footnotes. (I even like fiction with footnotes! Infinite Jest! Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell!) I might also blame the illustrations? oh well. ymmv
Planet lady love
I received a Reader Copy from Goodreads and William Morrow and offer an honest review.
A delightfully decadent sapphic horror story, spinning multiple tales within tales and weaving the gothic and modern not flawlessly, but very enjoyably.
If you’re looking for gothic horror without shock or gore, and with more than a dash of sapphic dazzle, this is truly excellent. Very modern, very smart, very feminist. Took a few chapters to get going, but once it did, the story rolled really well. Recommended.
