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Verdict: A 640-page illustrated gothic where every significant character is a queer woman and a cursed girls’ school keeps killing them — witty, sumptuous, and undone for a lot of readers by an ending that refuses to close.
Best for: Readers who want queer dark academia at full length, enjoy a narrator who interrupts with footnotes, and can accept a book that declines to tell you what was real.
Heat level: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5 — behind closed doors)
Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3.6/5 — a 3.63 Goodreads average across roughly 29,600 ratings, an Alex Award, and eight independent reviewers naming the same problem with the ending)
Tropes: Dark academia, cursed school, dual timeline, metafiction, Hollywood satire, poly triad, forbidden love in period setting, unreliable narration, illustrated novel, sapphic gothic.
Plain Bad Heroines is emily m. danforth’s second novel, published by William Morrow in October 2020 with black-and-white illustrations by Sara Lautman, and it is the book most often handed to anyone who says the words queer dark academia. In 1902, two students at the Brookhants School for Girls die in a swarm of yellow jackets while reading a scandalous memoir. A century later, a film crew arrives to make a movie about it, and three young women — a famous actor, a working actor and the writer whose book started it — find the school has not finished.
It won the Alex Award, was a Shirley Jackson nominee and a Locus Best Horror finalist, and it sits at 3.63 on Goodreads from roughly 29,600 ratings. The distribution tells the story: 36% at four stars, 28% at three, and only 21% at five. This is a book far more people admire than love, and the reason is remarkably consistent across the reviews. Both halves of that split are worth understanding before you commit to 640 pages.
What Is Plain Bad Heroines About?
It is a gothic comedy of manners with body horror in it, and the comedy is not incidental. danforth’s own description is the most accurate one available: a sapphic-gothic haunted house novel that knows it is a novel. There is an intrusive narrator who addresses you directly as “Dear Readers”, real footnotes, and period-styled illustrations throughout. Every significant character across both timelines is a queer woman, which is not marketing — it is structurally true, and it is the one thing the entire review corpus agrees on without dissent.
The 1902 strand follows Flo and Clara, the schoolgirls obsessed with Mary MacLane’s genuinely scandalous real memoir, and — more importantly for most readers — headmistress Libbie Brookhants and her partner Alexandra Trills. The present-day strand follows Harper Harper, Audrey Wells and Merritt Emmons through a film production that keeps going wrong. The two halves are tonally different books, and readers do not love them equally.
What Makes This Sapphic Gothic Work
- Everyone is queer, and nobody explains it: Four separate reviews at The Lesbrary — extraordinary coverage for one novel — and the recurring note is relief at a book where queerness is the water rather than the subject.
- Libbie and Alex: The headmistress and her partner are the emotional core, and the relationship readers say hurt the most. If the book has a heart, it is in 1902.
- The physical object: The illustrations and the design do real work — the clearest proof being a reviewer who rated it one star for boredom and still praised the book’s quality and artwork.
- The wasps: Yellow jackets are the book’s signature horror image and the thing readers cannot forget. Not one trade review warns about them.
- Xe Sands narrating 19 and a half hours: An Earphones Award winner, and several readers say plainly they would not have finished the print.
Book Synopsis
In 1902, Flo and Clara are inseparable students at the Brookhants School for Girls in Rhode Island, bound by a shared obsession with The Story of Mary MacLane — a real memoir by a real nineteen-year-old that scandalised America. They found a secret society in its honour. They are found dead together, covered in yellow jackets. Over the next few years more deaths follow, and the school closes.
A hundred years later, Merritt Emmons publishes a book about the Brookhants deaths while still a teenager, and Hollywood options it. The film will star Harper Harper, a genuinely famous young actor with an enormous following, opposite Audrey Wells, whose career is going nowhere and whose mother was a scream queen. The three women arrive at the restored Brookhants estate to shoot on location.
Things begin to happen on set that resemble things that happened in 1902 — and the narrator, who has been telling you all of this in an amused voice with occasional footnotes, becomes increasingly interested in how much you are willing to believe.
My Review
danforth can write, and the 1902 material is genuinely superb. Publishers Weekly starred it for “a fantastic sense of dread” and Library Journal starred it for an unease “constantly seeping in from the perimeter”, and both are describing the historical strand. Libbie and Alexandra are the best thing in the book by a distance — two women running a school and a life together in a period that gave them no vocabulary for it, and danforth writes their constraint without ever making them pitiable.
The queer density is the other real achievement. This is not a novel with queer characters; it is a novel in which the question of who is queer never comes up because the answer is everyone. Four separate Lesbrary reviewers wrote about it, one calling it “pretty much a perfect horror” and another simply “Oh, this is how books are supposed to be written.” For readers tired of being grateful for one supporting lesbian, the sheer saturation here is the point.
Now the problem, and it is bigger than I expected going in. Eight independent reviewers name the ending as the reason they marked the book down, and the recurring verb is fizzle. The book builds two timelines of dread across 640 pages and then declines to close the circuit — deliberately, as a metafictional move. What is unusual is that the fans agree on the facts: even a five-star rave concedes it is “entertaining as hell, even though it doesn’t resolve.” The split is purely over whether the refusal is sophisticated or is a withheld payoff, and it comes down almost entirely to whether you wanted a ghost story or a book about ghost stories.
Behind that sit three more consistent complaints, and one of them is invisible to every professional review. Six reviewers say it needed cutting; one, rating it a single star, calls it “egregiously overwritten.” Five say the modern Hollywood timeline is a slog next to 1902 — the comparisons reached for are Mean Girls and Gossip Girl, which is not what you want said about half your gothic novel. And then the narrator. Every trade review treats the footnoting, self-aware narrator as the book’s charm; a substantial group of readers experienced it as a 600-page tonal commitment they could not sustain. The clearest documented did-not-finish, at the halfway mark, is entirely about this — the constant addressing of “Readers” pushing her out rather than pulling her in. One device, and it widens into every other complaint: the length feels longer because the narrator digresses, the horror feels less frightening because the narrator undercuts it, and the ending feels like a cheat because the narrator is the one declining to resolve it.
One expectation to reset. It is shelved as horror, it was nominated in horror categories, and a number of readers arrive and find a funny, digressive gothic satire instead. As one two-star reviewer put it: “This ain’t horror, its romance with a side of drama.” She is describing the book accurately. If dread is what you want, the 1902 chapters deliver it and the present-day ones mostly do not.
My honest note: A gorgeous, clever, overlong novel with the best queer saturation on this list and the least satisfying ending. If you read for voice and atmosphere and can live without answers, it is a genuine pleasure. If you need a haunted house to mean something by the last page, this will feel like 640 pages of being winked at.
| Element | In Plain Bad Heroines |
|---|---|
| Central relationship | Libbie Brookhants & Alexandra Trills in 1902; a Harper–Audrey–Merritt triad in the present |
| Core tropes | Dark academia, cursed school, dual timeline, metafiction, poly triad, Hollywood satire, unreliable narration |
| Setting | The Brookhants School for Girls, Rhode Island — 1902 and a film shoot a century later |
| Heat level | 2/5 — behind closed doors |
| Series | Standalone, 640 pages, illustrated by Sara Lautman. No sequel |
| Content notes | Insect swarm horror (yellow jackets, extensively), body horror, death including child death, suicide, drowning, fire, gore, homophobia and lesbophobia, forced outing, institutionalisation, mental illness, sexual assault, misogyny, drug use, vomit |
How Dark and Spicy Is Plain Bad Heroines?
A 2 out of 5 for heat. romance.io files it at its behind closed doors band, and the same entry tags it FFF+ and poly — a genuinely strange catalogue decision for a book its publisher sells as gothic horror, and one that tells you how much the two databases disagree about what this is. There is desire everywhere in this novel and very little of it on the page.
Darkness is the more useful axis here, and it is uneven by design. StoryGraph readers mark it mysterious at 89% and dark at 85% but emotional at only 25% — a book that unsettles far more than it moves. The specific thing to know in advance is the insects. Yellow jackets are the central horror image, they recur, and readers name them more viscerally than anything else in the book; even reviewers who liked it report not being able to shake them. If swarms are a problem for you, this is not a book to try. For comparison at the same heat band, our reviews of Our Wives Under the Sea and Even Though I Knew the End both sit at 2/5, and both are considerably shorter routes into queer horror.
Who Should Read This Book?
You’ll likely love it if: you want a cast where every significant character is a queer woman, you enjoy arch and self-aware narration, you like your gothic long and furnished, and you are comfortable finishing a book without being told what was real.
You may want to skip it if: you need a haunted-house plot to resolve, a narrator who interrupts with footnotes will grate over 640 pages, insect horror is a hard limit, or you were promised horror and will resent getting satire.
In short: the queerest book on this list and the one most likely to leave you arguing with its last chapter.
What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)
This is not a BookTok book and I could find no evidence that it ever became one. I looked specifically for a 2024–2026 resurgence and found nothing but retail listings and reviews from the 2020–21 launch window. What actually drove it was Bookstagram, at publication, and the physical edition — a beautiful illustrated hardback that people photograph and keep. Six years on it survives as a queer dark academia perennial: stocked by queer indie bookshops, recurring on October horror lists, handed round rather than trending.
The audiobook is narrated by Xe Sands, runs about 19 hours 30 minutes from HarperAudio, and won an AudioFile Earphones Award.
Prefer audio? Listen to Plain Bad Heroines on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.
The audio is worth considering rather than assuming, because listener reaction splits in a specific way. Sands is praised for holding the two timelines together, and at least one reader says outright they doubt they would have enjoyed the book without her. The recurring complaint is the opposite side of the same coin — some find her monotone in places and the characters insufficiently differentiated, which is a real risk across nineteen and a half hours and four-plus points of view.
Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The queerness first, and specifically its totality — “nearly everyone is queer” is the recurring observation, and readers who normally ration their expectations respond to the sheer density of it. Second, the 1902 strand and Libbie in particular; when readers say a section wrecked them, it is almost always this one. Third, the atmosphere, with StoryGraph readers marking it mysterious at 89%. Fourth, the object itself — illustrations, footnotes, design — which even detractors compliment. One five-star reviewer’s whole verdict was that she could not stop thinking about it, and that is the register of the book’s admirers: it lodges.
What readers argue about and complain about: The ending, above everything, and by a wide margin — eight independent reviewers, with the recurring words being fizzle and just kind of ends. Second, length: six reviewers say it needed cutting, one calling it “egregiously overwritten”. Third, the modern timeline, which five reviewers find slack next to 1902 and which attracts Mean Girls comparisons. Fourth, and invisible to every trade review, the narrator and the footnotes — the documented mid-book abandonment is entirely about this. Fifth, a real “this isn’t horror” contingent of four. The genuine split is over the ending’s refusal, and it does not resolve: the same facts read as sophisticated to one camp and as a cheat to the other, and there is no argument available that settles it.
The standalone question worth asking first: It is a standalone with no sequel, and the more useful question is what it does and does not deliver. Two things to settle before you buy. First, the romance does not resolve conventionally — the present-day thread develops into a three-way dynamic that readers describe as building naturally, and then the metafictional ending withholds closure from the relationship exactly as it does from the haunting. If you need a couple to land, this book will not give you one. Second, where to go next: danforth has only two novels, and the other one is The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2012), which sits higher at 4.06 from 60,819 ratings and is roughly twice as read. It is realist queer coming-of-age set against conversion therapy, and tonally almost nothing like this. If you loved the queerness here and bounced off the metafiction, that is the book.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Plain Bad Heroines have a satisfying ending?
For many readers, no — it is the single most common complaint, raised by eight independent reviewers. The ending is a deliberate metafictional refusal rather than a failure of nerve, but it declines to resolve either the haunting or the romance. Even readers who rated it five stars concede it does not resolve.
Is it actually horror?
Partly. It won the Alex Award and was nominated in horror categories, but four reviewers say plainly that it reads as gothic comedy and satire with body horror in it. The 1902 strand delivers dread; the present-day one mostly does not.
Is there a romance, and does it end happily?
There is a poly triad in the present-day thread that readers say develops naturally, and a central couple in 1902 — but no conventional romantic resolution. romance.io rates the heat 2/5, behind closed doors.
How long is it, and does it drag?
640 pages, and yes for some. Six reviewers say it needed cutting, and 46% of StoryGraph readers describe the pace as slow against just 5% who call it fast. The modern timeline is where five reviewers locate the drag specifically.
What is the deal with the narrator and the footnotes?
There is an intrusive, self-aware narrator who addresses readers directly and annotates the text. Every trade review treats this as charming. A significant minority of readers found it exhausting at length, and it is the documented reason for the clearest mid-book abandonment.
Did it win any awards?
It won the Alex Award in 2021. It was a Shirley Jackson Award nominee and a Locus Best Horror finalist, and made the Stonewall Book Award shortlist — not, despite what some sources say, an Honor Book. It was not a Lambda Literary finalist at all, which is striking for a novel this uniformly queer.
If You Loved Plain Bad Heroines, Read These Next
Three with a genuine point of contact. Our Wives Under the Sea is the other literary sapphic horror novel on this site that ends in ambiguity rather than explanation, and it does it in a quarter of the pages. Gideon the Ninth shares the enclosed institution, the all-queer cast and the refusal to explain itself early. And Fingersmith is the pick if what you actually wanted was the Victorian strand at full length with a plot that lands. For more in this register, browse Literary & Character-Driven Fiction and the full Book Reviews archive.
The Bottom Line
danforth wrote a 640-page illustrated gothic in which every significant character is a queer woman, and much of it is a genuine pleasure. The 1902 strand is superb, Libbie and Alexandra are the best relationship on this whole list, and the book as an object is lovely enough that people who disliked it still say so. Against that: an ending eight separate reviewers marked it down for, a length six of them wanted cut, a modern timeline five found slack, and a narrator the trades adored and a chunk of readers could not tolerate. Worth it if you read for atmosphere and can live without answers; a bad bet if you need the haunted house to mean something. Check Plain Bad Heroines on Amazon →
The Eikna Overall Ranking
On the Eikna scale, Plain Bad Heroines ranks as an Alex Award–winning sapphic gothic doorstopper — the queerest and best-furnished book on this shelf, undone by an ending that declines to arrive, and best approached for 1902, the illustrations and the atmosphere rather than for the plot.
The Evidence Scorecard
Overall ★★★★☆ 3.6/5
- ✓ 3.63 average across roughly 29,600 Goodreads ratings
- ✓ Alex Award winner; Shirley Jackson and Locus nominee
- ✓ Starred by Publishers Weekly and Library Journal
- ✓ Eight reviewers mark it down for the ending
Romance ★★★☆☆ 3.2/5
- ✓ Libbie and Alexandra are the emotional core
- ✓ A poly triad readers say develops naturally
- ✓ Every significant character is a queer woman
- ✓ No conventional romantic resolution anywhere
Characters ★★★★☆ 3.8/5
- ✓ The 1902 cast is where the book’s heart is
- ✓ Harper Harper is a sharp piece of celebrity satire
- ✓ Four Lesbrary reviews praise the queer characterisation
- ✓ Present-day trio thinner than the historical pair
Writing ★★★★☆ 3.9/5
- ✓ Two starred trade reviews name the dread
- ✓ Footnotes and illustrations genuinely well used
- ✓ 89% of StoryGraph readers mark it mysterious
- ✓ One reviewer calls it egregiously overwritten
Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 3.5/5
- ✓ Libbie’s constraint lands hard on readers
- ✓ 85% of StoryGraph readers mark it dark
- ✓ Readers report it lodging for months
- ✓ Only 25% mark it emotional — it unsettles more than it moves
Heat Level ★★☆☆☆ 2/5
- ✓ romance.io’s behind-closed-doors band
- ✓ Desire everywhere, very little of it on the page
- ✓ romance.io tags it FFF+ and poly
- ✓ Only 52 romance.io ratings against 29,600 on Goodreads
Ending ★★★☆☆ 2.8/5
- ✓ The refusal is a deliberate metafictional choice
- ✓ Some readers immediately reread to understand it
- ✓ Eight independent reviewers name it as the flaw
- ✓ Neither the haunting nor the romance resolves
Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 3.6/5
- ✓ The illustrated hardback is a keeper object
- ✓ Readers report rereading to decode the ending
- ✓ Earphones-winning audio offers a second route in
- ✓ 640 pages, and 46% of readers call the pace slow
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