Book Review: Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran

Set in the 1920s at Briarley School for Girls, Avery Curran’s Spoiled Milk begins suddenly and dramatically, with the violent demise of everyone’s favourite pupil, Violet, who falls to her death on the night of her eighteenth birthday. The death is ruled an accident but the novel’s central character, Emily, and her rival for Violet’s affections, Evelyn, are sure it was murder, and they set their sights on the French mistress as their lead suspect. In search of answers, Emily and her classmates turn to the spirits but things soon spiral into something far darker and far deadlier that they could ever have imagined.

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“Supernatural exploration was the sort of thing one always hoped might happen at school, like in the books.”

Curran’s work is a novel that balances genre-lines settling somewhere between YA and adult fiction, and somewhere between horror and fantasy. The writing holds a youthful spirit as it weaves a twisted web of mystery, intrigue, and misdirects.

Despite the thoroughly dramatic start to the book, Spoiled Milk is a slow burning horror that grows darker and more chilling in quiet, creeping increments as the plot progresses. It isn’t until roughly half way through the novel before the paces begins to pick up considerably with more malice and tension as the characters fight their way to the heart-racing and savage climax.

The novel also isn’t as overtly and loudly queer in the beginning as I first expected it to be; perhaps due to the time period of the novel’s setting or the age of the characters at its centre. There is certainly a simmering Sapphic heart beneath the horror though, which battles against the internalised homophobia that fuels many of Emily’s choices. As the novel becomes increasingly chilling and violent though, so too does it become increasingly gay; as Emily can no longer deny her lusts or desires.

A more grown-up Malory Towers meets a haunted, Sapphic horror, Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran is a novel that is queer by many definitions of the word.

With thanks to the publisher for the review copy of this book.

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