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.

Plain bad heroines