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William Morrow
October 2020
On Sale: October 20, 2020
640 pages
ISBN: 0062942859
EAN: 9780062942852
Kindle: B083SMWFSF
Hardcover / e-Book
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LGBTQ | Suspense Gothic
The Favourite meets The Haunting of Hill House in 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—and the highly-anticipated adult debut from the award-winning author of The Miseducation of Cameron 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 has inspired a controversial horror film adaptation starring celebrity actor and lesbian it girl Harper Harper, who plays 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 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.
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