The combination of horror and lesbianism isn’t new. Why just this year my neighborhood had a Halloween contest where you had to name your house, and I decided our house had to have a lesbian name. Some of the ideas we came up with were already taken like the amazing “Sapphic Slashers” which is an academic book by Lisa Duggan. Some ideas that my friends had were brilliant but I thought too subtle for a hetero audience (Like “Rubyfruit Graveyard” so I decided on the in-your-face but also a clever pun, “Cloak and Bulldagger”.
I am sorry to say that our house, lit by queer vitality and a keen sense of horror, (only pictured with the first decoration up below) didn’t win so much as an honorable mention not because of homophobia but because all the neighbors voted for their friends. (I’m not bitter at all, but guess who didn’t enter the Xmas contest because it was clearly rigged.)
Plain Bad Heroines is a novel that is also lit by queer vitality and a keen sense of horror, chock full of lesbians.
This novel breaks the rules of this blog and my life. It is 617 pages long. I haven’t read a book that long since 1992 when I was ten years late in reading The Mists of Avalon, an 876 page tome about Arthurian Legends told from the perspective of the women. I wasn’t quite as into it as Nicole Cliff of http://www.theawl.com (quoted below), but close.
“I completely tore through it and wore more dresses for a while and dragged out my Loreena McKennitt CDs and took a lot of baths with Lush products and pretended to be a servant to the Goddess, but in that awkward, slightly-embarrassed, self-conscious way you do when you’re nearly thirty and still unable to erect productive boundaries between yourself and the written word.”
So yeah, ever since that embarrassing moment after reading The Mists of Avalon when I tried (and failed) to become someone’s Wicca apprentice in Aberdeen, Mississippi, I’ve stuck to reading short books.
Until Plain Bad Heroines. Why?
Well, first of all, the author is hot. I recognize that there are deeper ways to connect with literature than the objectification of its writer, but the world has been doing this for a while: you know, Kerouac, Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Sylvia Plath. The last one is unexpected, but actually is the first name to come up when you google “Writers Who Are Famously Hot”
Check out young Emily Danforth (below on the right), author of Plain Bad Heroines.
So yeah. I’m gonna read your 617 pages. And frankly, I enjoyed reading every single one of them, although I can’t exactly tell you why.
It’s a ghost story…well, actually, it’s two ghost stories, one set in 1902 at the Brookhants School for Girls where romantic school girl crushes on girls abound, and the other in 2015 in Hollywood where three queer women are working together under the direction of a renown avant garde horror film maker to make a movie about the Brookhants ghost on location…and I like ghost stories…..but……
( I really hope Emily Danforth doesn’t read this review because I will totally say my real name is Quinn O’Briant and you should go out with me and I don’t know who this Louisa person is)
the ghosts weren’t quite ghosty enough for me. Just like the butches weren’t quite butch enough.
It is basically like a really long L Word Ghost novel.
Full disclosure (and I’m probably going to get lesbian hate mail for this) I have only seen about 20 minutes of the L Word because I don’t like any of those people. And if Shane is as butch as you are going to get, I’ll take a pass.
There’s no depth, people. Which is what I regrettably have to say about Plain Bad Heroines. (That and there are far, far too many mentions of yellow jackets.) But do I as a primarily identified lesbian reader need depth?
I mean, maybe not. You can’t swing a dead cat in this novel without hitting a lesbian. I have never seen so many lesbians in a novel in my entire life. There are 42 of them in 1902 and at least as many in 2015. I mean this novel kills tokenization with sheer numbers of queers (and yellow jackets).
(This reminds me of a true story of when I was teaching undergraduate Spanish at the University of Tennessee in 1999. I was in the closet and scared of the frat daddies in my class but I decided to try to teach this lesbian poem in Spanish anyway. As soon as I had written it on the board, these frat boys just kept whispering, “lesbian lesbian lesbian” in the back of the room while this other girl student was trying to make a comment. I got so flustered that I spoke loudly in English and attempted to say to the female student, “It’s hard to hear you because all I can hear is the word, “lesbian””, but I opened my mouth and what came out was, “I get hard when I hear the word lesbian.” Three students immediately dropped to the floor in fits of hysterical laughter, and I just stood there like an unblinking queer deer in the lights of a semi truck, and said, “Ok. Open your grammar books to page 475.”)
So who cares if the plot doesn’t exactly resolve itself like you think it will? Who cares if the 84 lesbians in this book are kind of shallow and you never learn as much as you want to about their internal lives? If you are a lesbian like me, hungry for different images of yourself depicted in wild and seeming unending plethora, you will lap up every page of this novel and ask for more.
Tell Emily I liked it.
Inspiration and Information for Immigrant Advocacy 