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A Novel
by Avery Curran
A thrilling gothic debut. The untimely death of a student at a girls' boarding school marks the first in a haunting series of escalating supernatural events, and uncovers buried truths of teenage repression, queer desire, and the everyday horror of coming of age.
In 1928, Emily Locke's final year at the isolated Briarley School for Girls is derailed when Violet, the school's brightest star (and a cunning beauty for whom Emily would do anything), falls to her death on her eighteenth birthday. Emily and her buttoned-up rival Evelyn are, for once, in agreement: Violet's death was no accident. There's an obvious culprit, the French schoolmistress with whom Violet was getting a little too close—they only need to prove it.
Desperate for answers, Emily and her classmates turn to spiritualism, hoping for a glimpse of wisdom from the great beyond. To their shock, Violet's spirit appears, choosing pious Evelyn as her unlikely medium. And Violet has a warning for them: the danger has just begun.
Something deadly is infecting Briarley. It starts with rotten food and curdled milk, but quickly grows more threatening. As the body count rises and the students race to save themselves, Emily must confront the fatal forces poisoning the school. Emily's fight for survival forces her to reevaluate everything she knows: about Violet, Evelyn, Briarley, and, ultimately, herself. Avery Curran channels the indelible ambience and intrigue of the classic boarding school novel while turning the beloved genre on its head in this visceral, exuberant debut.
"Queerness weaves through the novel like an inversion of the rot spreading through the school...The use of foreshadowing effectively builds tension and dread...[T]he novel's true strength is exploring the complex relationships among the girls—both living and dead—and the unknowns of the world. A queer, eerie debut." —Kirkus Reviews
"Curran delivers a chilling tale of repressed passion, queer awakening, and the corrosive power of silence. It's an impressive start." —Publishers Weekly
"Spoiled Milk is a dirty little jewel of a novel, as thrilling as it is unsettling, as moving as it is frequently horrifying. Curran writes with incredible precision on fear, desire and the insidiousness of authority and empire. A truly impeccable novel." —Julia Armfield, author of Our Wives Under the Sea
"Spoiled Milk is a post-war fable about the death of Empire and a lesbian phantasmagoria, but it's also one of the most well-executed pieces of horror writing I've ever read. It is a terrifically nasty, loving, heretical, filthy look at the boarding school story; Avery Curran puts the entire genre in its grave and then invites the reader to view its exhumed corpse. This book destroyed me." —Tamsyn Muir, Locus Award-winning author of Gideon the Ninth
This information about Spoiled Milk was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Avery Curran studied history at university, where she first became interested in spiritualism. She finished an M.A. in Victorian studies in 2021, and is now midway through a Ph.D. on spiritualism and queerness in the nineteenth century. She was born in New York City and currently lives in London with her girlfriend and their cat.
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