BookWorld: A delectable brew of gothic horror and Hollywood satire

By Emily M. Danforth William Morrow. 623 $27.99 --For the past two weeks, I’ve been haunted by a lesbian ghost story, and I hope its ectoplasm hangs around for a long time.

“Plain Bad Heroines” is a shapeshifting novel by Emily M. Danforth. A hot amalgamation of gothic horror and Hollywood satire, it’s draped with death but bursting with life.

The book opens by calling forth the restless spirit of Mary MacLane. Though now largely forgotten, MacLane electrified America in 1902 when, at the age of 19, she published a shocking memoir originally titled “I Await the Devil’s Coming.” (Until further notice, all double entendres pp. intended.) In this luxuriant confession - what she called her “record of three months of Nothingness” - MacLane announced herself as a kind of female Walt Whitman, bouncing between egotism and eroticism. “I know I am a genius more than any genius that has lived,” she proclaimed, giving voice to frustrated teenagers everywhere. “My strong and sensitive nerves are reeking and swimming in sensuality like drunken little Bacchantes, gay and garlanded in mad revelling.” Looking across the world’s literature, MacLane saw few figures like herself. “I wish,” she wrote, “some one would write a book about a plain, bad heroine so that I might feel in real sympathy with her.”

More than a century later, “I Await the Devil’s Coming” is still a gobsmacking book. At the time, it was an instant bestseller and, of course, instantly condemned by the usual powers that be. One can only imagine how young women must have thrilled to read MacLane’s outrageous descriptions of sexual longing.

And that’s exactly where “Plain Bad Heroines” begins. “It’s a terrible story,” Danforth writes with mock solemnity. In 1902, at the Brookhants School for Girls in Rhode Island, the students are obsessed with Mary MacLane and her forbidden memoir. Some of the bolder students have even started a secret club: the Plain Bad Heroine Society.

As the curtain rises, two leading members of that scandalous group run out into the dark woods - “the source of sinister nighttime things.” Alas, one of them steps on a nest of yellow jackets and is “swallowed up by the swarmat once, as if she now wore a writhingmummy wrap of yellow jackets, a pulsing blackand-yellow outline that smothered her until she was now them.” Her young lover, hoping to help, rushes toward her but is “at once wrapped in her own cloak of yellow jackets.” Long after the girls are dead, the furious wasps maintain such an impenetrable guard over the site that local authorities have to burn a patch of woods to recover their venom-steeped bodies.

hat tragedy hangs over the doomed grounds of the Brookhants School for Girls, and the sound of those yellow jackets buzzes through the rest of the story. Indeed, “Plain Bad Heroines” may be the only novel I know that should come with an EpiPen.