Avery Curran
At a glance
The untimely death of a student at a girls’ boarding school marks the first in a haunting series of escalating supernatural events, and uncovers buried truths of teenage repression, queer desire, and the everyday horror of coming of age.
In 1928, Emily Locke’s final year at the isolated Briarley School for Girls is derailed when Violet, the school’s brightest star (and a cunning beauty for whom Emily would do anything), falls to her death on her eighteenth birthday. Emily and her buttoned-up rival Evelyn are, for once, in agreement: Violet’s death was no accident. There’s an obvious culprit, the French schoolmistress with whom Violet was getting a little too close—they only need to prove it.
Desperate for answers, Emily and her classmates turn to spiritualism, hoping for a glimpse of wisdom from the great beyond. To their shock, Violet’s spirit appears, choosing pious Evelyn as her unlikely medium. And Violet has a warning for them: the danger has just begun.
Something deadly is infecting Briarley. It starts with rotten food and curdled milk, but quickly grows more threatening. As the body count rises and the students race to save themselves, Emily must confront the fatal forces poisoning the school. Emily’s fight for survival forces her to reevaluate everything she knows: about Violet, Evelyn, Briarley, and, ultimately, herself. Avery Curran channels the indelible ambience and intrigue of the classic boarding school novel while turning the beloved genre on its head in this visceral, exuberant debut.
"Spoiled Milk is a dirty little jewel of a novel, as thrilling as it is unsettling, as moving as it is frequently horrifying. Curran writes with incredible precision on fear, desire and the insidiousness of authority and empire. A truly impeccable novel."
- Julia Armfield, author of Our Wives Under the Sea
"Spoiled Milk is a post-war fable about the death of Empire and a lesbian phantasmagoria, but it’s also one of the most well-executed pieces of horror writing I’ve ever read. It is a terrifically nasty, loving, heretical, filthy look at the boarding school story; Avery Curran puts the entire genre in its grave and then invites the reader to view its exhumed corpse. This book destroyed me."
- Tamsyn Muir, Locus Award-winning author of Gideon the Ninth
"The haunted lesbian boarding school horror show we always wanted. From its dread-inducing opening to that breathtaking finale, Spoiled Milk is brimming with images that we’ll carry into way too many nightmares. Avery Curran is a witch."
- Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta, authors of Feast While You Can
The night Violet died, we had just finished celebrating her eighteenth birthday. Being the darling of the lower years, upper years, and schoolmistresses alike (and rich on top of that), Violet had been given countless presents. She held court after dinner in the younger girls’ playroom while she opened them. It was the sort of little kindness she liked to extend when it suited her; our common room was off-limits to everyone but the upper sixth.
One of the lower fourths gave her a posy of evening primroses and the last of the harebells, picked during afternoon break and tied with a ribbon. Violet gasped with delight and leaned forwards to drop the girl a swift kiss on her rosy cheek. Then it was our turn.
Three weeks before, when everyone had arrived for the new school year at the beginning of September, I’d persuaded the other upper-sixth girls to pool our allowances, meagre as some of them were, to buy Violet a pair of real kid gloves with pearl buttons at the wrist. That ghastly prig Evelyn Hart had gone to the village on Saturday to pick them up, and she’d come back full of stories about how the shopkeeper had allowed her to touch them before he wrapped the gloves in parcel paper, and how they were softer and more delicate than anything she had ever seen, and how it was a shame none of us with our grubby paws would be allowed anywhere near the cream-coloured leather so as not to stain them before they reached Violet’s perfect hands. I loathed Evelyn more than I could express.
As Violet opened her present, we held our breath, waiting for her approval. She seemed to like them; at least I think she did. I never got the chance to ask her about it in private. I like to think she would have told me the truth. Either way, she thanked us all and slipped the gloves on, exclaiming at how well they fit and promising to wear them at chapel the next week, a bending of the rules that I felt dead certain she would be allowed. I gave myself a moment—just a moment—to think about how her gloved hands would look holding the hymnal, or clasped together during prayers. Naturally we were supposed to keep our eyes shut during that part, but I thought I might be forgiven a peek. If you were in Violet’s orbit, the rules could bend around you, too.
Picture an overripe apple: from the outside, it appears polished and glossy, but when sliced open the rot within is exposed. Much that apple, when you peel back the shiny exterior of the upper-years at Briarley School for Girls, you’ll find a truth far less innocent than what meets the eye: from the séances they sneak out to participate in to the pulsing undertones of queer desire running through the group.
Spoiled Milk begins with the death of golden girl Violet, “to whom all others paled in comparison” according to our protagonist Emily; even in death she appears “more real, more vivid than the rest of us.” The spectre of Violet looms across the novel, as she drives the narrative from beyond the grave—a testament to how death is not always the end of the story, but, as in this case, can be just the beginning.
Spoiled Milk is an exercise in contradiction: it’s a coming-of-age story about death and mortality, a dark gothic written in lush, stylish prose. Much like a Dutch Vanitas painting “warning the viewer of the risks of youthful hubris,” the novel spills over with worms and maggots, spoiled fruit and rotting flesh, linking the innocence of girlhood inextricably with decay.
Child death.
