But as Brookhants opens its gates once again, and our three modern heroines arrive on set to begin filming, past and present become grimly entangled-or perhaps just grimly exploited-and soon it’s impossible to tell where the curse leaves off and Hollywood begins.Ī story within a story within a story and featuring black-and-white period illustrations. Her bestselling book inspires a controversial horror film adaptation starring celebrity actor and lesbian it girl Harper Harper playing the ill-fated heroine Flo, opposite B-list actress and former child star Audrey Wells as Clara. 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, feminist history surrounding the “haunted and cursed” Gilded-Age institution. Less than five years later, The Brookhants School for Girls closes its doors forever-but not before three more people mysteriously die on the property, each in a most troubling way. This is where their bodies are later discovered with a copy of Mary’s book splayed beside them, the victims of a swarm of stinging, angry yellow jackets. They meet in secret in a nearby apple orchard, the setting of their wildest happiness and, ultimately, of their macabre deaths. To show their devotion to Mary, the girls establish their own private club and call it The Plain Bad Heroine Society. 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.

Synopsis from Goodreads: Our story begins in 1902, at The Brookhants School for Girls.

This ARC was provided by Harper Collins UK (via NetGalley) in exchange for an honest review.

Plain bad heroines paperback