Plain Bad Heroines: A Novel

ISBN: 0062942867

Author: Danforth, Emily M.

Condition: New

NATIONAL BESTSELLERThe award-winning author of The Miseducation ofCameron Post makes her adult debut with this highly imaginative andoriginal horror-comedy centered around a cursed New England boarding school forgirls-a wickedly whimsical celebration of the art of storytelling, sapphiclove, and the rebellious female spirit.A delectable brew of gothic horror and Hollywood satire. . . deliciously ghoulish. -Ron Charles, Washington PostOur story begins in 1902, at the Brookhants School forGirls. Flo and Clara, two impressionable students, are obsessed with each otherand with a daring young writer named Mary MacLane, the author of a scandalousbestselling memoir. To show their devotion to Mary, the girls establish theirown private club and call it the Plain Bad Heroine Society. They meet in secretin a nearby apple orchard, the setting of their wildest happiness and,ultimately, of their macabre deaths. This is where their bodies are laterdiscovered with a copy of Marys book splayed beside them, the victims of aswarm of stinging, angry yellow jackets. Less than five years later, theBrookhants School for Girls closes its doors forever-but not before three morepeople mysteriously die on the property, each in a most troubling way.Over a century later, the now abandoned and crumblingBrookhants is back in the news when wunderkind writer Merritt Emmons publishesa breakout book celebrating the queer, feminist history surrounding the hauntedand cursed Gilded Age institution. Her bestselling book inspires acontroversial horror film adaptation starring celebrity actor and lesbian itgirl Harper Harper playing the ill-fated heroine Flo, opposite B-list actressand former child star Audrey Wells as Clara. But as Brookhants opens its gatesonce again, and our three modern heroines arrive on set to begin filming, pastand present become grimly entangled-or perhaps just grimly exploited-and soonits impossible to tell where the curse leaves off and Hollywood begins.A story within a story within a story and featuringblack-and-white period-inspired illustrations, Plain Bad Heroines is adevilishly haunting, modern masterwork of metafiction that manages to combinethe ghostly sensibility of Sarah Waters with the dark imagination of MarishaPessl and the sharp humor and incisive social commentary of Curtis Sittenfeldinto one laugh-out-loud funny, spellbinding, and wonderfully luxuriant read.