Plain Bad Heroines: A Novel [Paperback]

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A delectable brew of gothic horror and Hollywood satire . . . [and] what makes all this so much fun is Danforths deliciously ghoulish voice . . . exquisite. Ron Charles, THE WASHINGTON POST

A multi-faceted novel, equal parts gothic, sharply funny, sapphic romance, historical, and, of course, spooky. ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

Named a Most Anticipated Book by?Entertainment Weekly? Washington Post? USA Today? ?Time? ?O, The Oprah Magazine? Buzzfeed? ?Harper's Bazaar? ?Vulture ?Parade HuffPost? Refinery29? ?Popsugar E! News? ?Bustle The Millions? ?GoodReads Autostraddle ?Lambda Literary? ?Literary Hub and more!

The award-winning author of The Miseducation of Cameron Post makes her adult debut with this highly imaginative and original gothic horror-comedy centered around a cursed New England boarding school for girlsa wickedly whimsical celebration of the art of storytelling, sapphic love, and the rebellious female spirit

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 Marys 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 foreverbut 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, femlƒ­