Emily M. Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines is a dual-timeline horror that follows the mysterious happenings of Brookhants School for Girls. In 1902, two teenage girls fell in love, both with each other and with the scandalous writing of Mary MacLane, only to die tragically with the book by their side. More mysterious deaths follow, until the school has no choice to shut its doors. Over a century later, these deaths become the subject of a controversial horror adaptation, but strange events plague the film, and the longer it goes, the harder it becomes to tell what is Hollywood gimmick and what is truly cursed.
For me, this is pretty much a perfect horror. Told as a nonfiction-style history of this fictional film, the book uses snarky footnotes, news articles, and tweets to enhance the world of these women, a narrative device that I personally will never have enough of. At nearly 600 pages, the book does lean further into literary/historical fiction than some readers may want, but for me, this was once again a positive. All of the time spent on their histories, their relationships, made it easier to get invested in them as people first, so I cared about their haunting more. Besides that, long passages spent on completely normal events made me forget at times that this was meant to be horror at all, which made it all the more unsettling when something creepy happened.
I will say, much as I enjoyed most of the happenings in this book and I don’t think its length was wasted, I also don’t think it would have hurt the book to cut down maybe fifty pages. Perhaps it is the nature of dual timelines, but there were moments when I found myself thinking, this is a lot of marriage drama, can we please go back to the ghosts? Those moments were rare (most of the time I was equally invested in the marriage drama and the ghosts), but nevertheless, I stand by those moments.
I also think our heroines could have been just a bit worse. With a title like Plain Bad Heroines, I expected them to be meaner, or at least more feral. That feeling, I think, came from my assumption that Flo and Clara, the girls who died in 1902 after founding their Plain Bad Heroine Society, would be main characters (my own mistake, as nowhere in the blurb does it actually suggest this). Perhaps I have too high a tolerance for women’s wrongs, but I didn’t find them bad really at all.
I don’t actually mean to say that like it’s a bad thing, of course. It’s not. Even at their worst (which, again, was very rarely actually bad), I liked Audrey and Harper and Merritt. I actively found the romance sweet as it developed in the modern timeline. I cared about what happened to them, which, as a reader who doesn’t tend to get scared by books, I find most important in any genre, especially in a book of this length. And by the end, I found everything I invested in this book completely worth it. In fact, I immediately wanted to read it again so I could fully understand exactly what it did now that I had the full picture.
As a ghost story, as a metafiction history of a cursed film production, as an examination of the complex relationships between queer women in two time periods, this book succeeds on all levels. This is a book that knows exactly what it is, and I highly recommend Emily M. Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines.
