Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran
Violet hadn’t fallen down the stairs – this was reported incorrectly in the few newspaper articles that were published about the incident, all of which I have tracked down and kept through the intervening years. She fell over the balustrade itself, directly from the landing onto the floor below. It was easily a fifteen-foot drop.
Blood was seeping from the back of Violet’s head through the plait I had made a few minutes before, turning her golden curls nearly black in the evening light. Her neck was at a bad angle, ant the bone of one of her shins had broken through her skin like splintered wood. Her fist remained closed, hadn’t had the time to uncurl yet, and I could see a trickle of red coming from her hand where she had been clutching the bottle of scent. Shards of glass glinted on the floorboards and the perfume pooled around her. The smell of violets wafter upwards, so strong it felt like it might choke me, with a metallic smell underneath that I didn’t want to think about. There could be no question that she was dead. Another heavy sound came from behind me and I turned to see Mademoiselle, slumped to the floor in a faint. That, although I didn’t know it at the time, was the beginning of the end of Briarly.
Spoiled Milk opens with Emily Locke, a senior boarding pupil at Briary School for Girls, recalling the moment her best friend fell to her death. The story begins in London, 1928, on the night of Violet’s eighteenth birthday. Emily, openly infatuated with Violet, immediately casts suspicion on the French schoolmistress that competed with her for Violet's affections.
Desperate for answers, Emily and her classmates turn to occultists and books on the afterlife, hoping to find answers from the spirit world. Violet’s spirit eventually appears, momentarily taking over the unwilling body of the staunchly religious Evelyn, warning them all of a grave danger - Briarly School has been taken over by dark forces. In the coming days, as the food spoils and the teachers become increasingly hostile to what pupils are left, the small group of schoolgirls band together to find a way to lift the curse or at least escape before the now-homicidal teaching staff can find them.
Spoiled Milk is the debut novel from Avery Curran and is thick with gothic foreboding and spilled bodily fluids. The dialogue is quick and snappy, especially refreshing to come entirely from a cast of 1920s women and girls who take up almost all of the roles, protagonist and antagonist alike. Reminiscent of St Trinians with a dash of Mary Shelley, hysterical teenage outbursts are moderated by a shrivelling comment or a sharp slap from one of the other pupils. The girls are delightfully bitchy towards one another, Emily’s internal monologue and externalised disdain for her rival Evelyn is thick with that kind of immediate teenage scorn that smooths over the years. A lovely example I picked out was Emily looking over at Evelyn reading a book:
She was reading something characteristically pretentious – Jane Eyre, I think, which suited her sense of drama.
I get the sense that Curran very much enjoyed devising the various cutting ways that the girls talk to each other, while under it all still maintaining a deep sense of caring. I also enjoyed reading a book in which the protagonist isn’t especially likeable at times, dealing with a mess of issues of grief and self-repression. This is never more clear in the girls’ treatment of the Mademoiselle, who Emily at first is convinced was responsible for killing Violet, taking great pains to persuade the others to her way of thinking.
The horror is polished and well rendered, Curran utilising all kinds of senses to show the reader that something at Briarly is terribly wrong. Take for example this passage early in the novel when all the school’s food begins to spoil inexplicably.
I raised an apple to my mouth and bit into it. The skin was taut and red but once I’d broken through I felt my teeth sinking into soft, mealy flesh – too sweet, with a bitter edge – and then something moved inside my mouth, crawling against my tongue.
As the story picks up speed towards the conclusion, Spoiled Milk reads like body horror, limbs and wounds being chewed on, spat out, bursting like overripe fruit. There’s also an uncanny quality to the horror, some of the girls choosing to leave and then either freezing in time and space or disappearing into the fog. The otherworldly, supernatural forces are well described, but I was left wanting a little bit more of a tangible explanation for how and why things were happening. The forces building in Briary School for Girls remained opaque and vaguely hinted at. Curran doesn’t explain whether there’s a tangible explanation to it all, perhaps a drug or spoiled-milk induced psychosis, or whether the girls themselves exacerbate the problem through continued connections with the spirit world.
The causative thread for Briarly descending into madness and horror is largely by the by, but I did find myself taken out of the story at times trying to get a handle on why the personality of the teaching staff and other children changed while the senior girls did not. It might be that a closer, second reading would give me a clearer understanding of what happened.
Several reviews and blurbs for Spoiled Milk describe it in various ways as being a lesbian-tinged horror story, my favourite being ‘a Haunted Lesbian Boarding School Horror’. I went in expecting much more of a mucky book than I found it to be. While there is a sexually graphic scene close to the end, other than that the lesbianism is more an undercurrent and a mechanism of describing the repression of sexuality at the time. I think Curran is careful and delicate writing about the girls’ sexuality, whether Emily and Evelyn’s infatuation with the late Violet, or the undercurrent of some of the other girls’ quiet moments of intimacy.
At a first glance, I didn’t think Spoiled Milk would be my cup of tea but it’s much more rooted in the classical ghost story or mystery novel than I first gave it credit for. It’s a novel of quick-witted final girls trying to survive vast, unknown terrors. The horror is viscerally described, and the eroticism just sort of sweats in the background, a few occasions of unrestrained desire bursting out of an overwhelmed corset. Reviews have compared the novel to Shirley Jackson or Daphne du Maurier, which I think are decent comparators. I think this would also suit fans of Angela Carter given the feminist take on a classic boarding school mystery, especially as most of the girls are independently minded, brave, and looking out for each other even in the direst of circumstances.
Spoiled Milk is published by Hatchett on the 12th March. You can buy a copy from bookshop.org, who donate a portion of the sales to independent bookshops of your choosing. Thanks to NetGalley and Hatchett for an advanced reading copy.