Plain Bad Heroines
In 1902, two young women are obsessed with the scandalous writing of (real-life author) Mary MacLane and in love with each other. Meanwhile in the year 20— (essentially today but without the pandemic) the world’s hottest (and lesbian) movie star Harper Harper is going to star in a movie about said (dead) girls.
The dual timeline of this quick-witted novel toggles between a trio of women involved in a movie about the sapphic women who died tragic deaths at a cursed Rhode Island estate, and the early 20th-century stories of the dead women and their loves. As the movie production moves haltingly toward the film that the narrator slyly promises on the first page, ominous echoes of the past appear: hallucinations, rotten apples, ghostly presences and, most of all, wasps. The three present-day women are caught in a triangle with both each other and the horrors of the past, while the women in the past grope toward what is surely a tragic ending.
emily m. danforth daubs on the gothic whimsy with a heavy brush, layering the story with references to MacLane’s popular memoir, popular fandom, social media, and pop culture both contemporary and historical. For a novel pitched as a horror story, there’s an awful lot of foreboding and relatively little screaming, and some of the plot twists seem obvious (particularly when the too-cute-by-half footnotes nudge the reader in the right direction). But there is more than enough wonderful character development, creepy dark forests, and clever interrogation of art and artifice to make this an utterly enjoyable read. Recommended.
