Something Wicked (and Queer) This Way Comes: "Spoiled Milk" by Avery Curran

Coming-of-age? Done. Homoerotic? Done. Paranormal activity, spine tingling horror, critical examination of the imperial gothic genre? All. Done.

Spoiled Milk is Avery Curran’s debut novel, and what a debut it is! Painfully tender, meaty, and meandering prose, coupled with a flawless understanding (and avant-garde reinvention) of both the boarding-school and gothic novel, the novel effortlessly transports the reader to England, c. 1928. 

Here, we follow one Emily Locke through her unravelling senior year at Briarley School for Girls, starting first and foremost with the death of Violet Kirsch. Violet is a star student, social savant, and the object of Emily’s subconscious desire, though Emily herself would vehemently deny those claims. Searching for closure, Emily seeks out her mimetic rival, Evelyn, who she frequently butted heads with in a joust for Violet’s affections. 

Through an intricately orchestrated series of events, including a hushed trip to the town medium, Violet’s spirit manages to get a message across the veil - instead of whatever closure that Emily has so wished for, it is a warning of worse things to come. And come they do; milk curdles, food rots, and students drop like flies. The rest of the book is a desperate race for Emily to see if she can get to the bottom of everything—including her own feelings—fast enough.

Curran truly has a knack for pacing; despite being in the Gothic genre—I came into the novel expecting a traditional Gothic ramp up, that slowly creeping sensation of horror we are all familiar with whether reading Shelley or Stoker—the novel is gripping in its entirety. The author leads us, the readers, on - keeps us in the mire, for an excellent payoff. 

Not only is the pacing done right, but the prose certainly helps. I’m not a squeamish reader by any chance, but a few scenes were so affecting that I had to wait to read them in the light of day. The author holds a PhD in queerness and 19th century spirituality, which certainly steals the show here. The supernatural elements, like the seance and the medium, are extremely well-researched. As a history major myself, I’ve got to love the appreciation Curran has for historicity. 

Nevertheless, Spoiled Milk floundered, for me, in its attempt to engage with certain themes surrounding institutionalized injustice. To Curran’s credit, she briefly acknowledges the slave trade, but it ends there - we are told that the school is a manor built by profiteers from the sugar and implicitly, the slave trade. However, this, and other mentions, tended to read more like the author signaling directly to the reader that she isn't superficially engaging in the setting, as much historical fiction tends to do, rather than having any significance to the characters themselves. Set in such a charged time—1920s England, rife with modernization and its discontents, the post-war era and Dada, the forever hungry mouth of empire. Yet any attempt to engage these topics are relegated to subtext. The characters, as can be expected of queer teens in a boarding school context, struggle against the conformity that is imposed onto them, certainly. However, there is no meaningful ideological engagement with the structural frameworks, for example heteronormativity or the conservative social structures that enable the empire to this day. 

Nevertheless, when evaluated as a whole, the novel is charming. Spoiled Milk is a queer coming-of-age intermingled with horror, and it checks all of those boxes several times over. There are no expectations for the novel to also serve as a political manifesto - the author acknowledges the political reality of the time, and that is already above expectation for most historical fiction these days. While not a groundbreaking text, Spoiled Milk is still a delightful and effervescent read. In less than three hundred and fifty pages, Avery Curran will spook you, endear you, and ask you to examine your relationship to the conformist zeitgeist. 

Lead photo: Cover art for Spoiled Milk. Courtesy of Penguin Random House.

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