Emily M. Danforth's Plain Bad Heroines tells a deliciously convoluted and self-referential set of nested stories. The first layer of story takes place in 1902, on the site of a girls' boarding school. Subsequent layers happen in the same location but in modern times, when the property seems cursed as several people (historical and modern) have died mysterious deaths. Are they explicable? Is this a novel where magic is real? The author plays coyly with the reader about this in a very clever way.
The author also winks at the modern reader throughout. On page 111,
In the language of the day, Mrs. Brookhants was a young widow and Miss Trills was her devoted companion. Her very, very dear friend. Her confidante.
Her bestie.*
*But, like, with benefits.
Bonus layers come from the modern plotline, which features a modern novelist writing about the girls of 1902, and then some modern actors caught up in their own re-enactment of pieces of the novel's retelling of history, while also ensnared in their own mysteries in the old building and on the grounds, and caught up in the layers of storytelling and fabrication that they are subject to and producing themselves. There is a historical book associated with the original deaths, a modern book retelling the historical deaths, and the very book you hold in your hands. The brain spins. The modern actors are caught up in performing the historical actions, often even off-camera as they hand off the book and tell each other secrets and sneak around the boarding school buildings. This is a mystery book where the characters have cell phones with battery life, internet connection, and live social media, and the mystery manages to persist!
The creepiness and uncertainty about danger elevated this novel from a cleverly-constructed meta-question-raising book, to an unstoppable single-sitting-read. It's 617 pages long, so this consumed an entire day. I probably couldn't read it again, because I'm not a fan of creepiness and also now I know how the novel chooses to resolve the various mysteries, weird occurrences, deaths, and bizarre behavior.
Weird and recommended.
This post's theme word is "gifnotized", as on page 82:
That's the GIF, the whole thing--- Harper grinning and tucking and being mic'd, grinning and tucking and being mic'd, grinning and tucking and... forever. This particular incarnation had 23,266 notes. It also had a string of attached commentary.
"Hello?" Harper said.
Merrit had been momentarily gifnotized. She pulled out of it and said...
