In the early 1900s, Clara and Flo, two students at Brookhants School For Girls, fell truly, madly, and deeply in love, and brought together by a shared obsession with a scandalous memoir. Then they are killed by a swarm of yellow jacket wasps with said scandalous memoir found lying next to their intertwined bodies. Three more grisly deaths followed, forcing the school to close, and sparking rumours of a “Brookhants curse”. (Appropriate then, that it’s pronounced ‘brook-haunts’).
Fast forward to the present day and our plain bad heroines three: Audrey, Harper, and Merritt. Audrey and Harper are Hollywood actresses, brought together to play the starring roles of Clara and Flo in the film adaptation of Merritt’s book about the Brookhants curse. But as they all assemble to start filming, strange incidents start happening, past and present seem to blur, and soon it becomes difficult to tell where Hollywood ends and the curse begins…
Reading Plain Bad Heroines is like gorging on a dark, dense, rich, boozy cake, to the point where you go past feeling sated and start feeling sick. And if that doesn’t sound like much of an endorsement, I promise you it’s meant as one!
Danforth is well known for her YA debut, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, a story about a young girl sent away for conversion therapy, made into a film starring Chloe Grace Moretz. This, her second novel and intended for adult audiences, is a great big gothic, sapphic romp.
Playful is the name of the game here: the narrator addresses the reader throughout, in the narrative and in footnotes, and the tone is distinctly sly and conversational, not only commenting on proceedings but frequently offering their own opinion, and is as much a character in the story as the characters themselves. And the narrator is not the book’s only meta element. The conceit of The Happenings at Brookhants—the film being made in the modern day strand of the story—is that it’s really two films: the story of Clara and Flo and the Brookhants curse and the behind the scenes story of the people making it. So far so Blair Witch, which even the characters themselves lampshade, allowing the story to have even more fun by interrogating and playing with modern horror film tropes (Audrey is the daughter of a ‘Scream Queen’ for instance).
But like the undergrowth in the Brookhants tricky thicket, hiding the fateful yellow jacket nest, there are layers to this story and beneath the playful upper-most layer is genuine gothic chill. Brookhants is situated in Rhode Island, which as the narrator points out, is the birthplace of H.P. Lovecraft and his brand of nightmarish, creeping horror. And it’s this, rather than the high camp and jump-scares of Hollywood horror, that permeates the book. The hauntings manifest through sensations—the recurring scents of overripe apples, the salt and brine of the sea, fresh lavender; the constant presence of yellow jackets; what may be aural and visual hallucinations—as well as strange occurrences, to the point where the lines between reality, fantasy, and coincidence are irrevocably blurred, particularly on the film set where we know that there will be incidents that are supposedly engineered. In this way, another good comparison is Shirley Jackson as Brookhants and Spite Manor (the other important location) feeling very much in the vein of Hill House.
This dichotomy between the gothic and the playful is also shown in the differences between its US and UK covers. The US cover is all gothic: black with red silhouette Angel’s Trumpet flowers and the title in a cursive font. Whereas the UK cover is bright yellow and hot pink, with the title in big block capitals (and the only time I will praise a cover that has a giant wasp emblazoned on it).
The last layer is, of course, a sapphic love story. There is LGBTQ+ representation all over this book as nearly all of the characters, major and minor, identify as part of the community, and there are several sapphic love stories that the narrative follows (it’s not entirely in jest that Harper refers to Brookhants as “Planet Lady Love”). It also uses certain elements to explore, or at least dip a toe in exploring historical LGBTQ representation, in particular The Story of Mary MacLane, the first memoir of the early twentieth century American diarist of the same name—in which she openly expresses attraction to another woman, her “anemone lady”—the same memoir that Flo, Clara, and many of the other characters become obsessed with.
The action in both time strands builds before coming to a head, then winds down, ending with neither a bang nor a whimper. It leads to an epilogue that, if it were the final scene in a horror film, isn’t a return to normality nor a surprise where the monster makes one final lunge, but rather leaving the door to the monster’s room unlocked—whether for good or ill is up for the reader to decide.
In all, Plain Bad Heroines is a fun, sexy, and genuinely spooky doorstop that once you’re in its pages, it grabs you and doesn’t let go, despite its size. And if you were already scared of things that buzz, skitter, and scuttle, then prepare to be made even more wary.
“What’s the racket yell-ow jacket? At Brookhants you roam…”
Plain Bad Heroines is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
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 illustrations.
