By turns haunting, compelling, and illuminating, Avery Curran’s new novel, Spoiled Milk, is perfect for fans of queer Gothic horror and historical fiction.
Set in England in 1928, Emily Locke is in her final year at the Briarley School for Girls, an isolated boarding school designed to provide middle- to upper-class girls with accomplished educations. What should be a glorious final year in the place that feels most like home to Emily becomes a nightmare when Violet, the school’s most-beloved pupil, dies suddenly on the night of her birthday. The death is ruled a tragic accident, but Violet’s devoted acolytes Emily and Evelyn are convinced that her murderer is still walking free at the school: the French teacher with whom Violet had a deep attachment.
Emily, Evelyn, and their classmates set out to prove that Violet was murdered by her teacher. The girls turn to spiritualism, hoping that a séance might reveal the truth—or better yet, Violet herself; however, they get more than they bargain for when Violet does appear to warn them that something is rotten on the grounds of Briarley, and a curse is coming to devour them all. Food rots, milk spoils, and violence ignites as Briarley descends further into isolation and chaos, and the girls must face the evil rising in the shadows or risk being consumed themselves.
This book was a refreshing and well-researched horror novel that was grounded in the world of the girls’ boarding school, medical and psychological theories, and spiritualist discourses popular in this era and previous decades. Though it takes some time to get the plot moving, Spoiled Milk manages to be deeply unsettling at the same time that it offers compelling character portraits of a group of girls coming of age in an environment that proves to be hostile in more ways than one. Emily is a character who is difficult to truly like for much of the book, and yet her grief and her determination make for propulsive reading and a satisfying narrative of self-discovery.
Spoiled Milk asks more questions than it answers much of the time. There are many mysteries at the heart of this book, and it contains all the gory, terrifying, impossible-to-look-away-from elements of a great horror novel. Curran’s work showcases queer horror at its most subversive; no one is who they seem, everyone has hidden desires that can only remain so for so long, and there are bright moments of devotion amidst so much danger.
I highly recommend Spoiled Milk for lovers of horror fiction, Gothic novels, or queer historical fiction. This novel had everything I was looking for and more!
Please add Spoiled Milk to your TBR on Goodreads.
Content warnings: violence, death, homophobia
Rachel Friars is the co-author of Neo-Victorian Lesbians on Screen (Anthem Press, 2025) and completed her doctorate in English Literature Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada in 2024. Her research centers on neo-Victorianism, lesbian literature and history, and the Gothic. Her work has been published in Studies in the Novel, The Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies, Crime Studies Journal, and in The Palgrave Handbook of neo-Victorianism.
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