Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran
Something deadly is lurking in the background of Briarley School for Girls in this queer Gothic boarding school novel
It is the year 1928, and someone – or something – deadly lurks in the grounds of Briarley School for Girls. Avery Curran’s debut novel Spoiled Milk is as much a letter of consolation to teenage grief and sexuality as it is a witty interrogation of the systems that uphold their repression. In this book, death gradually touches all that it sees, and no one can officially identify the culprit. It opens describing schoolgirl victim Violet Kirsch and continues detailing the observations of Emily Locke and the other schoolgirls who are both grieving – and sceptical over – Violet’s gory demise. This leads to a series of conspiracies and seances; all the while, Briarley seems to be falling into decay.
With tenderness, Curran quietly weaves elements of young queer love into this narrative of mystery, for what else is queerness to a heteronormative and self-hating institution of thought and power but a mystery? Curran does not aim to dispel secrets about gender or sexuality, but respects the spoken and unspoken dynamics they produce between teenage girls. Sightings of the supernatural become a metaphor for the nuanced growing pains of queerness, but also a criticism of those who pervert religious ideas to produce cultures of shame. “So I kept it to myself," she writes, "let it fester, felt sure beyond anything that it was a warning to me specifically, for some unknown sin that only I could have committed.”
