The novel's strength lies in its quiet insistence that queer women have always existed, that their lives deserve bigger, messier containers-even metafictional ones about a horror flick based on a novel based on a true story. The novel switchbacks between past and present, examining the sophisticated subculture of upper-crust Victorian-era lesbians and the Insta-fueled fame of queer icons in contemporary Hollywood. Joining Harper on set are ingenue Audrey Wells, daughter of slasher film royalty, and Merritt Emmons, a wunderkind novelist whose first book inspired the film. The novel's other major timeline takes place in contemporary Hollywood, where Harper Harper, the 'indie-film-darling turned celesbian-megastar-influencer,' sets out to produce her first film, a horror flick about Brookhants and its doomed teen lovers. The long, winding story of Brookhants' rise and fall is only one thread that danforth unravels throughout her adult debut.

When the club's leaders, Florence Hartshorn and Clara Broward, are found dead in one another's arms, the school's founders struggle to move beyond the tragedy only to be swept up in it themselves. Detailing MacLane's lust for 'the anemone lady' and her refusal of traditional gender norms, the book gives rise to the Plain Bad Heroine Society.

In 1902, Brookhants pupils become obsessed with Mary MacLane's salacious memoir, I Await the Devil's Coming. '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.' Unusual things happen at Brookhants School for Girls, a boarding school situated along the wild, rocky Rhode Island coastline. In this sprawling, structurally ambitious novel, the gruesome deaths of two turn-of-the-century boarding school girls haunt generations of women and the women they love.

Plain bad heroines emily danforth