The Cursed Novel That Ate a Whole Summer

Wasps, a cursed book, and two timelines that don’t trust each other

Here’s the setup, and stick with me because it’s got moving parts. In 1902, at the Brookhants School for Girls in Rhode Island, a student named Flo dies from a wasp sting while reading a scandalous novel called Mary MacLane’s The Story of Mary MacLane (a real book, by the way, which is a nice touch of Danforth grounding her fiction in an actual scandalous memoir). Her girlfriend Clara dies the same way not long after. Then a third girl. The school gets a reputation as cursed, the wasps become a kind of folklore, and Brookhants eventually shuts down in disgrace.

Cut to the present day, or close to it. A horror film is being made about the Brookhants deaths, based on a bestselling memoir by a woman named Merritt Emmons, and the film’s two young stars, Harper Harper (a hot mess of a movie star) and Audrey Wells (a scream queen trying to level up), are being thrown together with Merritt on the actual cursed grounds to shoot the thing. Naturally, wasps start showing up again. Naturally, nobody who isn’t in a horror novel would keep filming.

So you’ve got three women in 1902 and three women in the present, doubled across time, both trios circling the same kind of dangerous intimacy: desire, jealousy, ambition, and whatever the wasps actually are. It’s a clever structure. It’s also a lot of structure, and Danforth takes her sweet time letting the two timelines actually talk to each other.

What actually works, and what made me want to throw it at a wall (affectionately)

Look, the atmosphere is the best thing here. Danforth built her reputation on The Miseducation of Cameron Post, a book that’s tender and specific and aches in exactly the right places, and she brings that same eye for queer girlhood to Brookhants, except now it’s soaked in gothic dread instead of conversion-therapy grief. The wasp mythology is genuinely creepy in a way that doesn’t rely on jump scares, it relies on accumulation, on the sense that something in the ground itself has gone wrong. I loved the way the book treats female desire as the actual haunting. Not a metaphor bolted on afterward. The actual thing that’s cursed.

And the meta layer, movie stars playing dead girls who loved each other, is sharp when it lands. Harper Harper is a great character, magnetic and self-destructive in a way that feels true to a certain kind of famous young queer woman navigating a closet with a very expensive door. Audrey’s arc, the good girl actress terrified of what this role might expose about her, gave me one of the book’s best slow-burn tensions.

Here’s my real criticism, and I’ll just say it: this book is too long, and it knows it, and it does it anyway. Danforth includes photographs, yearbook pages, and printed ephemera throughout, which is a fun formal trick the first few times and starts to feel like padding by page 400 of a 600-plus page book. The 1902 sections drag in the middle third, looping back over the same jealousies and warnings without enough new information to justify the repetition. I found myself skimming, actually skimming, through some of the present-day film-set scenes, which is not something I do lightly. A book this smart shouldn’t need me to skim.

Now let me question my own taste for a second, because I know plenty of readers who consider the slowness the whole point, a deliberate, creeping dread that mirrors how folklore actually spreads, slowly, through repetition and rumor. Maybe I just wanted a horror novel to move like a horror novel and this one wants to move like a nineteenth-century sensation novel with a Y2K horror movie stapled to it. That’s a legitimate choice. It’s just not always a fun one to sit inside for 600 pages.

The scariest thing in this book isn’t the wasps. It’s how easily a story about two girls who loved each other gets rewritten into a story about a curse.

About Emily M. Danforth

Emily M. Danforth grew up in Montana, which she’s said shaped basically everything she writes about isolation, religion, and queerness in small places. Her first novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, became a defining queer YA book and later a film starring Chloë Grace Moretz. She teaches creative writing and clearly did her homework on gothic literature and turn-of-the-century sensation novels before writing this one. She’s also just very online in a way that makes her feel like a real person rather than an author-brand, which I appreciate.

If the wasps got you too, read these next

• Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, for the same rotting-house dread with tighter pacing
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, for the ur-text of women, isolation, and being blamed for what happened to a house
• The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Danforth herself, if you want to see her do the queer coming-of-age ache without the 600 pages of gothic scaffolding
• Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, for a different flavor of dark academia horror with more forward momentum

You can find a copy here: Plain Bad Heroines on Amazon.

For your book club

1. Why do you think Danforth chose wasps specifically as the recurring horror image, rather than something more traditionally gothic?
2. Does the present-day film production feel like a meaningful commentary on how we consume real queer tragedy as entertainment, or does it become its own distraction from the 1902 story?
3. Harper and Audrey mirror Flo and Clara in obvious ways. Did that doubling deepen the horror for you, or did it feel too neat?
4. The book is famously long and stuffed with visual ephemera. Did that choice earn its place for you, or did you find yourself wanting a leaner version of this story?
5. What do you think the book is ultimately saying about who gets to tell a dead girl’s story, and who profits from it?