Plain Bad Heroines by emily m. danforth

Plain Bad Heroines by emily m. danforth, read by Xe Sands

• Publisher: HarperAudio, 2020
• Genre: Horror
• Format: Audiobook
• Length: 19 hrs 27 mins (623 pages)
• My Rating: ★★★★ (4/5)

Click on the cover for my review on Goodreads.

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AUDIOBOOK REVIEW

Content warnings: death (including drowning), gore, insect (yellow jacket), hallucination, internet trolls, alcohol (recreational, abuse), fat-shaming, murder, manipulation, PTSD (maybe)

I listened to the audiobook of Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines narrated by Xe Sands. The narration itself was, without a doubt, 5 stars. I don’t think I would enjoy the book as much if not for Sands’ performance since her voice, always with a slight tremor and purposefully distorted in hallucinations as well as under curses, made this horror story feel creepier than it would have been on paper.

The structure and storytelling of the story are incredible. It opened with Clara’s and Flo’s deaths by yellow jackets in 1902 at the Brookhants School for Girls. Back in the present day, actor Audrey Wells (20s, bi) and celesbian Harper Harper (lesbian) are set to star in Bo Dhillon’s (gay, Indian-American) horror movie The Happenings of Brookhants based on the book by Merritt Emmons (20s, sapphic).

The parallel between the past and the present as well as the mysteriousness of a certain copy of Mary MacLane’s (bi, a real person) The Story of Mary MacLane are the best things in the bigger picture of Plain Bad Heroines. There were clear themes of generational struggles, inheritance, and heritage weaved through and within the different timelines. One other major theme that tied everything together was trickery and deceit, which fades in and out of the story.

Since Flo and Clara tragically died in the beginning, we didn’t get to learn too much about them, and I am completely content with that. We are then introduced to another misfortune of Brookhants student Eleanor Faderman. Half of the story also followed the past timeline with principal Libbie Packard Brookhants, her lover Alex Trills, and Adelaide.

I adore Alex. There are a lot of characters in the book but I love Alex the most and I don’t even know why. The other characters in the early 1900s weren’t particularly lovable but each has distinct personalities. As for the modern trio, I love how their relationships with each other changes and evolves. Merritt was impossibly rude toward Audrey in the beginning, and while I kept wondering why anyone would say such hurtful things, I also accept that the characters were flawed human beings, and they say pitiful things out of spite like most people do in real life. I slowly warmed up to Merritt, and she just might be my favorite person in the present time.

Danforth’s cinematic writing delivered wonderful details and vividly painted visual pictures of everywhere the characters went. I love how careful the word choices were and that the narration not only brought the physical settings alive, it, along with the dialogues, clearly characterized everyone in the story. It is always great to feel like I know the characters intimately rather than just in passing. I also appreciate that Danforth kept most dialogue tags.

Almost all the women are sapphic in PBH, including Flo and Clara, Libbie, Alex, and Adelaide, Harper, Audrey, and Merritt, and even Elaine. There were other casual queer characters, including Bo and Kai (they/them). It made me really happy that queerness is the norm throughout the whole book.

I took a little too long to listen to the audiobook and my understanding of the plot suffered a little bit from that. Given this tome of a book, I am not entirely sure that I would relisten it, especially since I do not need more descriptions of yellow jackets materializing in faucets, but PBH is so rich and beautiful that, had I had all the time in the world, I would definitely listen and read it over and over again.

The ending of PBH was carefully and wonderfully crafted. I love the shift of power and relationship in the final scene. I truly appreciate the hint of sapphic empowerment at the ending. Whatever tragic events that took place at the Brookhants School for Girls in the past were overpowered by the hopefulness and excitement for the future in the closing scene in the present. Danforth did a beautiful job at writing this open ending, leaving just enough for imagination without too many unresolved loose ends.

My main and only complaint of the book was that the pacing became a bit too fast toward the end. The final scenes in the past felt like an info dump, introducing characters never seen before. I understand the necessity of keeping things a mystery, but it felt slightly unbalanced compared to the rest of the book.

Throughout PBH, the narrator, an omniscient entity, mixes reality with hallucination, everyday lives with curses, that it wasn’t easy to determine what was real and what was not. But aren’t our lives the same? Things we aren’t sure were dreams or not, events painted by the media that could only have been half-truths. I love that the book left a bit of ambiguity in the horror aspect—was it some sort of sapphic power? Was the book about the joy and curse of being queer?

I don’t read a lot of metafiction, and more often than not, I dislike the preachiness that sometimes comes with the storytelling technique. But not Plain Bad Heroines. I didn’t particularly feel that the narrator was intentionally concealing information, and maybe because I listened to the audiobook, I love that it added yet another layer to the storytelling, in addition to the movie being made about Merritt’s book.

Plain Bad Heroines is a very light horror and I enjoyed every minute of Sands’ narration and Danforth’s writing. The eeriness of the yellow jackets, moss, and apples stretches beyond the love of Flo and Clara, the dreams of Libbie and Alex, the dramatics of the modern trio, and into the world of each and everyone of the readers.

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