She’s clearly a horror buff: besides Lovecraft, there are explicit nods to Blair Witch, Peter Straub, Berberian Sound Studio, M Night Shyamalan, The Omen and innumerable others. Which events are being orchestrated by the director, and which are legitimately supernatural? Could there really be a curse on Brookhants, and if so, when did it begin? With the deaths of the girls, with the tensions between Libbie and Alex, or with MacLane’s book, which seems to trail destructive passions wherever it’s found? Perhaps the trouble started earlier, when the Brookhants family home was built around an old folly known locally as “Spite Tower”, after a legend that it was erected to settle a score between two brothers by blocking a favoured view.ĭanforth braids the layers of narrative together with expertise.
That brings our trio to Brookhants, and this is where things start to get really creepy. Happenings is Audrey’s chance for a big break, so when the director explains that he wants her to conspire in creating a behind-the-scenes found-footage movie in which Merritt and Harper will be unwitting co-stars, she reluctantly agrees. Īnd cast alongside Harper, there’s Audrey Hall, a young actor following unsteadily in the footsteps of her scream queen horror-star mother. (She’s been toying, futilely, with a continuation of Truman Capote’s unfinished novel Answered Prayers.) Happenings is now being turned into a film, produced by and starring the world’s hottest “celesbian” Harper Harper (her name is explained but I won’t spoil that here) the descriptions of Hollywood presumably draw on the adaptation of Danforth’s 2012 bestselling YA debut The Miseducation of Cameron Post. There’s Merritt Emmons, a one-time wunderkind who wrote a dazzlingly successful book called The Happenings at Brookhants when she was 16, and has entered her early 20s with nothing more to show but writer’s block. Those events entangle three more Plain Bad Heroines in the present day. The relationship between principal Libbie Brookhants and her dear companion Alexandra Trills is tested beyond natural limits. But then two of the club’s members are killed by a freak swarm of yellowjacket wasps, one of their admirers dies strangely, and after that things get weirder still at Brookhants (pronounced “Brook-haunts”, a pun which the narrator disowns with winning chutzpah: “I cannot help that the school’s name is Brookhants and that it’s said to be haunted”). In the early 19th century, MacLane’s (real) book reaches Rhode Island’s (fictional) Brookhants School for Girls, where its scandalous mix of sapphism and ego inspires the formation of a Plain Bad Heroines Society.
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