Here's something unusual and fascinating that I enjoyed but don't quite get. Before I dive into it, though, I want to point out how absolutely gorgeous it looks inside. Credit for the book design is to Anna B. Knighton and she's done a fantastic job. The choice of typefaces is surprising but very effective, with an agreeably old fashioned one for the text but a much more modern one for the chapter headings. The page numbers alternate between the top left and bottom right, with the author's name unusually climbing up the left hand side but the book title working down the right. I can't remember seeing that before but I like it a lot.

But back to the book. We're at the Briarley School for Girls, located somewhere in Sussex, in 1928, as the girls of the lower sixth celebrate Violet's eighteenth birthday. She's a special student, for whom rules don't seem to apply. Everyone gravitates towards her, not least two fellow students, Emily and Evelyn, who seem to compete for her affection. However, it's the French teacher, Mlle Lefèvre, who she's been kissing goodnight for months. And hey, Violet's surname is Kirsch, which I'm very aware is the German for "cherry", just in case we didn't catch the sexual overtones.

Anyway, Violet kisses Mademoiselle goodnight and promptly falls over the balustrade. She's dead on page eight, broken at the bottom of a fifteen foot drop, and "That, although I didn't know it at the time, was the beginning of the end for Briarley." So says Emily Locke, who acts as our narrator throughout, and she's not wrong. Violet won't be the last death this term and the title represents something else weird, namely that all the food seems to be going bad ridiculously quickly. Marion holds a midnight feast and the apples, pristine on the outside, are crawling with maggots. There's a beetle in Olivia's porridge in the morning. And, as the title suggests, the milk goes off in a blink.

It's this weirdness that makes us focus less on Emily's obsession, probably rooted in jealousy but a little bit of common sense too, that Mademoiselle murdered Violet. She gradually convinces some of the other girls and they accuse her in the school's sanitarium where she's been trying to come back from the shock of her lover's death right in front of her. However, she suggests that there's going to be another death and it happens to the schedule she suggests. When Emily rushes up to the San to check on her, she clearly hasn't moved. It isn't her after all.

My biggest problem with the book is that we never really find out who or what it is. Avery Curran simply isn't that interested in writing a straightforward mystery, instead building the horror and suspense until it erupts into violent action on its way to the finalé. There's plenty to set a theme, but it's up to us how we interpret that theme.

It could be the metaphorical legacy for a school that's housed within and named for the mansion of a family that got rich on slavery. It could be a manifestation of lesbian angst. It could be about the power of sexual awakening in new adults. Maybe it's simply a coming of age push back at the strict society conventions taught in these schools. It could be any combination of those, including none. And is Mr. Kirsch a corrupting influence on the school or the school a corrupting influence on him? I have no idea, but surely his whisperings in the ears of eighteen year old girls are more than just creepy.

The biggest success is how it subverts the traditional girls' boarding school story, which I'm most aware of through Enid Blyton and Elinor Brent-Dyer but who mostly wrote after the 1928 date in which this is set. Blyton's 'St. Clare's' and 'Malory Towers' series didn't begin until the forties and Brent-Dyer's long-running 'Chalet School' series had only launched in 1925. That's why it's Angela Brazil, their most important predecessor, who's mentioned within the text. I hadn't realised that she was quite as early as she was. Regardless, this feels like such a novel, even though it's horror in genre and fascinatingly spiritualist in outlook.

This is a debut novel and the author is a student of spiritualism, becoming interested in the topic at university then working at the archive of a Swedish mystic. She's now writing her PhD thesis on queerness in nineteenth-century spiritualism, which gives precisely the grounding she needs for a book like this. That angle begins with Sophie, an upper sixth student, who steals a book during an excursion to London, 'Spiritualist Phenomena and Mediumship' by A. L. Walden. The girls use it to host séances after visiting a professional medium in town and learning that Evelyn is a natural.

Initially, Violet manifests within Evelyn, a detail included in the back cover blurb so surely not the spoiler it might otherwise be. That doesn't make her happy, because she's jealous of Emily as she interacts with Violet even after her death through her body while she can't, being in a trance for the experience. Later, Violet manages to levitate and eventually materialism in the ectoplasmic form, which would seem a lot more cool than it does if it didn't happen at a point when the school was being torn apart by, well, rabid teachers and cannibal zombies. I did mention this was horror.

I liked this a lot while I was reading it. Curran is a talented writer who nails the timeframe and the school genre and subverts it wonderfully into horror. Her characters are agreeably varied and, to different degrees, flawed. Emily is certainly a notably headstrong lead who's selfish in her deeds, if not her friendships. Evelyn is wildly jealous. Violet, even after her death, is always the centre of attention. However, we still sympathise with all of them, because they aren't bad or evil, just not perfect, which is entirely appropriate for seventeen or eighteen year old girls. Her language use is wonderful too, her deliberately old fashioned prose flowing like water.

However, once it ended, I struggled to justify its lack of explanation. Did she forget to wrap that aspect up? Did she not care? Or was she just relying on the theme, whatever we interpret that to be, taking its place as the reason why everything goes pear shaped in such memorable fashion. I don't know and that doesn't feel right. It's tender and creepy and haunting, but none of it is ever given a fundamental reason and that lessens it to my thinking. I guess I'll let it sit in my brain and puzzle over it until I can read Curran's second novel and compare the two. ~~ Hal C F Astell