Is This Still Real Life? Plain Bad Heroines by emily m. danforth
I can’t bill this book any better than the author herself. The website of the brilliant emily m. danforth bears this teaser for the novel:
“Picnic at Hanging Rock + The Blair Witch Project x lesbians = Plain Bad Heroines”
To borrow a style from the book itself: Readers, it does not disappoint.
The story’s cheeky narrator kicks the tale off in 1902, with the tragic and peculiar deaths of two young women—Flo and Clara—at Brookhants, their boarding school on the coast of Rhode Island. Their untimely deaths are tangled up in their passionate love affair, and in their mutual obsession with the young writer Mary MacLane, whose scandalous, crimson-bound book The Story of Mary MacLane (original title I Await the Devil’s Coming) they carried with them everywhere.
Flo and Clara’s deaths set the scene for the recurring themes and threats—curses, death, madness, unreality, yellow jackets, hallucinations, spiritualism, secrets and lies. (So many gothic tropes, but all reimagined in a sly, sunshiny, delightfully devoid-of-men way.) But Flo and Clara are not actually the heart of the novel. That distinction goes to the trio of contemporary heroines, the Hollywood starlet Harper Harper, the struggling actress Audrey Wells, and the prickly writer Merritt Emmons. The novel follows them as they attempt to film a movie adaptation of Merritt’s historical book, The Happenings at Brookhants, chronicling—you guessed it—the deaths of Flo and Clara, and the subsequent chilling and tragic events that followed.
If this all sounds a little meta, well, you’re not wrong. The book might not pull it off if it had been too earnest, but its omniscient narrator is nudging us along all the way with a wink here and a footnote there. Too much, Readers? she asks at one point, in a footnote at the bottom of page 508. I was hoping that we’d come to a place in our relationship where you’d allow it.
The narrative travels back and forth between the 1902 timeline, focusing on Libbie Brookhants, the young headmistress of the school and her lover, fellow teacher Alexandra Trills, and the modern timeline, in which filming on location at the abandoned (and cursed??) Brookhants school—you guessed it again—is not going smoothly.
There are gorgeous set pieces here, including the Orangerie, a steamy hothouse of trees that bear citrus fruit and poisonous angel trumpet flowers even in the middle of Rhode Island’s winter blizzards; Spite Tower, a tall and treacherous turret that you enter at your peril; an orchard full of “Oxford apples” that have been bred a deep purplish black; and a glittering and sinister depiction of “The White City”—Chicago’s World Fair of 1893. Even contemporary Los Angeles manages to be painted in light both shimmering and sordid.
When things get creepy—and, despite its playful humour, the book does creepy incredibly well—the fright of yellow jackets crunching under your teeth, slimy black algae infecting your bath, hidden eyes watching from the shadows, all mingle with the absolute horror of not knowing for sure whether this is happening and the curse is real, or whether you are slowly sliding into madness.
This particular trope of gothic fiction, the confusion between what is real and what isn’t, works remarkably well paired as it is with the unreality of social media and the staged lives of superstars. More than one character voices the question “Is this still real life?” and you know many others are wondering the same. Who would have thought that gothic fiction would lend itself so well to sunny California? But it does. It really does.
Clocking in at a hefty 617 pages, this book never feels long, and there is not a single passage I would have cut from it. In fact, I’d be quite happy with another few hundred pages at least. It’s immersive, it’s enjoyable, it’s chilling, and you will absolutely bond with these loveable characters and be sad to leave them, even if their world is often humming (quite literally) with malevolence.
Plain Bad Heroines
emily m. danforth
617 pages. 2020
About Lindsay Hobbs
Lindsay is a freelance editor, writer, and podcaster living in the Haliburton Highlands of Ontario, Canada. In between reading books (and writing about them), she works as a library branch assistant and program developer. Currently, Lindsay is an editor at Cloud Lake Literary and the co-host of Story Girls: A Fortnightly Podcast About Books, with a Dash of Absurdity. You can find her personal bookish musings at her blog, Topaz Literary.
