Kind Devil, deliver me

 Sometime over the winter a friend who was aware of my “only reading about goths and lesbians and goth lesbians” challenge for 2020 recommended very strongly that I read Emily M. Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines, a 600-page horror novel about a series of grisly deaths at a turn-of-the-century private girls school and the movie about them that is being shot on the premises in the present day. Said friend even went so far as to buy me a copy (on ebook, for pandemic reasons) and send it directly to my Kindle, which is the sort of thing that happens when you’re friends with a lot of librarians. This weekend I was very tired after slogging my way through this month’s segment of Varney the Vampyre and decided I wanted to read a Gothic novel that was actually good, so the haunted girls school it was.

 

I had sort of assumed that the haunted house with a history of mysterious deaths meant it was going to be a ghost story and that the deaths would be mysterious murders, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. The estate--consisting of the building and grounds of Brookhants, the girls’ school; Spite Manor, the mansion of the rich family that owned the school; a stretch of woods; and a stretch of beach--are supposedly cursed, and have been since before the school was built, as such, all the deaths are merely highly improbable and grisly accidents. And since it is the land that is cursed, the horror elements are very in the creepy-crawly malevolently natural end of things--ongoing themes include rotting Black Oxford apples, mysterious black algae and seaweed, unseasonable snows, and a fuck-ton of yellowjackets. 

 

I hate yellowjackets a lot, like a lot a lot, and so this was an excellent element to throw in the middle of a book that is otherwise full of things I mostly just think are fun, like lots of New England weirdness, some movie magic, some writing and history nerdery, lots of meta-storytelling, excellent jokes, and many very well-dressed lesbians. It made it actually very scary.

 

I ended up eating through the whole book in about 48 hours, of which my only regret is that I got so into the book that I didn’t realize how late it was on Saturday and forgot to take a bath, which would have been extra deliciously creepy at certain points. I would absolutely have freaked myself the fuck out (and probably dropped the Kindle into the bath). 

 

The book is big and sprawling and structurally complicated, jumping around to different timelines and perspectives, tracing out the lives and deaths of at least half a dozen viewpoint characters over more than a century. The mysterious deaths that anchor the story are the grisly death-by-yellowjackets of Flo and Clara, a pair of teenage lovers at Brookhants and the leaders of the Plain Bad Heroines society, a fan club for the bestselling memoir The Story of Mary MacLane. However, we really don’t get much about Flo and Clara, except as objects of discussion from the other characters. Our main viewpoint characters in the 1902 timeline are Eleanor Faderman, a fellow student who wasn’t actually friends with Flo and Clara but gets obsessed with The Story of Mary MacLane after the girls’ deaths; Libbie Brookhants, the school principal; and Alexandra “Alex the Flirt” Trills, a teacher at the school and functionally Libbie’s wife. In the modern timeline, we get viewpoint chapters from Audrey and Harper, the two actresses cast as Clara and Flo, and Merritt, author of the book The Happening at Brookhants and now a script consultant on the movie. 

 

One thing I enjoyed about this book is that it’s genre-savvy enough not to go the obvious route of “we’re going to film this horror movie on location at a haunted place, it’ll be fine” and then having terrifying things happen; instead, the characters involved are all familiar enough with the history of horror cinema that when strange and dangerous things happen on set, they can’t always tell if it’s the director trying to gin up gimmicky press coverage for his haunted movie or if something more malevolent than the director is actually afoot. So there’s a lot of psychological tension and some pretty sophisticated exploration of movies and horror and Hollywood exploitation and the ethics of scaring the shit out of people for entertainment. 

 

It’s also extremely gay, like, literally everybody in this book is gay, one of my favorite parts is when Merritt and Harper are discussing how gay was everybody really at this all-girls private school in the woods in 1902 and Merritt had to put on her historian hat and be like “intense romantic friendships were a common part of women’s college culture back then but probably most of them weren’t all that gay,” and then we go back in time and it’s like no, everyone at Brookhants was really that gay. Every character that gets more than two lines of dialogue is gay. The only straight person in this entire book is Audrey’s mother. Queer horror FTW.

 

I have a lot to say about this book but obviously I don’t want to give too much away in the review, which means I need more people to read this so I can enthuse about it to additional people besides the friend who very correctly recommended it to me.