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.
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Avery Curran is a writer and researcher. She studied History at university, where she first became interested in spiritualism. She finished an MA in Victorian Studies in 2021, and is now finishing a PhD on spiritualism and queerness in the nineteenth century. Her thesis has so far included a perpetual motion machine powered by a mysterious sex ritual, a mercurial spirit medium who gave séances at the court of Napoleon III, the queer properties of ectoplasm, and a lesbian relationship that lasted beyond the death of one of its participants. Avery was born in New York City and currently lives in London with her girlfriend and their cat. Her first novel, Spoiled Milk, a lesbian gothic horror novel set in the 1920s, is forthcoming in March 2026 with riverrun (UK), Doubleday (US), and Penguin Random House Canada.
