Plain Bad Heroines

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

The award-winning author of The Miseducation of
Cameron Post makes her adult debut with this highly imaginative and
original horror-comedy centered around a cursed New England boarding school for
girls--a wickedly whimsical celebration of the art of storytelling, sapphic
love, and the rebellious female spirit.
"A delectable brew of gothic horror and Hollywood satire
. . . deliciously ghoulish." --Ron Charles, Washington Post
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 Mary's 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 forever--but 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, feminist history surrounding the "haunted
and cursed" Gilded Age institution. 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. 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.

A story within a story within a story and featuring
black-and-white period-inspired illustrations, Plain Bad Heroines is a
devilishly haunting, modern masterwork of metafiction that manages to combine
the ghostly sensibility of Sarah Waters with the dark imagination of Marisha
Pessl and the sharp humor and incisive social commentary of Curtis Sittenfeld
into one laugh-out-loud funny, spellbinding, and wonderfully luxuriant read.