Emily M. Danforth’s Plain, Bad Heroines is a quirky and highly inventive meta-gothic novel which combines dual storylines: the mysterious deaths at a girls’ boarding school at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the making of a film about the school’s supposed curse in the twenty-first century.
At Brookhants School for Girls in 1902, impressionable students Flo and Clara fall in love, brought together by their obsession of a scandalous memoir by Mary MacClaine. They form a club – The Plain, Bad Heroine Society – and meet in secret in the woods, until they are killed in a horrific attack by yellow jacket wasps; their intertwined bodies found with a copy of MacClaine’s book. Despite attempts by the headmistress Libby Brookhants to keep it open, Brookhants School is forced to close after further mysterious deaths, which are rumoured to be caused by a curse linked to the book. Over a hundred years later, Merritt Emmons publishes a breakout book celebrating the history of the School, which then inspires a new horror film adaptation which will be filmed on the abandoned estate. When Merritt reluctantly joins the film’s lead actors – lesbian it girl Harper Harper and former child star Audrey Wells – on set, the past and the present become ever more entangled, and the three women struggle to separate reality from movie-making. Will they fall under the curse, or are there other forces at play?
‘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 . . .’
Described by its author as ‘like Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Blair Witch Project, but with lesbians’, Plain Bad Heroines is a hugely ambitious novel, combining elements of gothic horror, queer romance, feminist history, and a satire of movie-making in the era of social media. (There’s even a nod to dark academia, with the setting of an exclusive boarding school and a prominent role given to a real-life subversive book). There are dual storylines which run concurrently and are brought together by a narrator with a wry, playful voice, who teases the reader with their knowledge and treats them to extra detail and context through footnotes (as I’m a huge fan of footnotes in postmodern fiction, I loved this aspect). Like the motif of nesting dolls used in one of the storylines, this book is a story within a story inside another story – or strictly speaking, this is a novel based on the making of a film, which is based on a book about the tale of a school’s ‘cursed’ history. Danforth has set herself a very high bar with this novel, and it (mostly) delivers.
‘Eleanor Faderman knew many books. But never before had she read a book that seemed to know her.‘
One of the strongest parts of Plain Bad Heroines is the setting; it is packed full of gothic elements, especially the isolated Brookhants estate itself with its dead schoolgirls, peculiar staff, the grounds draped in fog and darkness, ‘Spite Tower’, and the ever-present hum of angry yellow jackets. The story is very atmospheric, with a creeping feeling of dread and foreboding which increases as the novel progresses. I loved the richness and depth of the novel’s world-building and characterisation; at times it read like a female-led prose version of American Horror Story with less gore, but more suspense and consistency in its plotting (if it was ever adapted for TV, Sarah Paulson would make a wonderful Libbie).
‘That version, as with so many of the stories we tell about our history, erased a woman- a plain, bad heroine- in favor of a less messy and more palatable yarn about two feuding brothers from New England.‘
However, as much as I enjoyed this book, I was slightly disappointed. Although the novel overall had a strong narrative drive, the 1900’s storyline was the more conventionally ‘successful’ as a ghost story as it had a clearer resolution. (It was also tinged with tragedy, as characters are overcome by larger, unseen forces). The present day storyline has a large intriguing build-up to the making of the film and the first weeks on set, but then there is a large leap forward several months into the future, which left me with many questions about what happened during the making of the rest of the film. This ending is much quieter than I was expecting; but as one of the main themes is the silencing and removing of women (especially queer women) from history, I think I understand why Danforth decided to end on a more ambiguous, and perhaps happier note.
Nevertheless, I very much admired Danforth’s sass and swagger; Plain Dead Heroines is a rich and vibrant multi-layered book that you can lose yourself in (I wouldn’t be surprised if it became a cult classic). At 600+ pages, it is not a quick read, but I never felt like it dragged. Those who suffer from spheksophobia (fear of wasps) may find some scenes particularly unpleasant, but otherwise if you’re looking for a highly original, queer feminist, meta-gothic novel about weird happenings on a school estate in rural Rhode Island, this is likely to be the book for you.
The Reading Bull 