Spoiled Milk

by Avery Curran

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 just 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 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.

Genres: Horror, Historical Fiction, Queer, Dark Academia, Gothic, Fiction, LGBT

322 pages, Hardcover

First published March 10, 2026

About the author

Avery Curran studied History at university, where she first became interested in spiritualism. She finished an MA in Victorian Studies in 2021, and is now midway through a PhD on spiritualism and queerness in the nineteenth century. She was born in New York City and currently lives in London with her girlfriend and their cat.

Reviews

[emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

i love to judge a book by its cover

(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)

[Sidney · Rating 3 out of 5]

on one hand I do think Spoiled Milk is a solid debut, on the other it did kind of end up missing the mark for me. there's a lot going on in this one that I usually love; supernatural horror, gothic atmosphere, seances, mysterious murders/deaths...

I liked the idea of an all girls boarding school but to be honest, most of the characters were just...annoying. it doesn't help that it's told in Emily's pov, who just so happens to be the most unlikeable character out of all of them.

I understand this is a gothic novel so I went into it anticipating a slower pace but this has to be one of the slowest gothic books I've read. the first half was well done, it kept my interest & I was excited to see where it was headed. the second half however, just gets repetitive at times, there's a lot of breaking away from the present to info dump on things that really don't matter or fully connect to what's going on in the story that really made it drag so a lot of the build up of tension was lost.

there were definitely some creepy moments here & there but we never really get an explanation as to why these things are happening & the open ending left me with too many questions.

like I said a solid debut, & I will definitely look out for what the author releases in the future, but this one just slightly missed the mark for me

Thank you to NetGalley & the publisher for this arc in exchange for an honest review

[Greekchoir · Rating 5 out of 5]

WHAT A BOOK!! Spoiled Milk begins with a death and things get worse. The writing is sharp, precise, something almost nostalgic in the way it paints Briarley and the dynamic between the girls. To talk about this book too much would be to spoil it. I admire Avery Curran's restraint: the plot is achingly slow and resists the urge to gesture at itself or puncture the tension. The Queen's England is rotting and we haven't decided if the people to face it are girls or women.

A little bit of Suspiria, a lot of Penance, but also The Locked Tomb and weirdly...The Penderwicks? This might be the only book to ever have scared me.

Cheers to Netgalley and Penguin for the ARC.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

ARC for review. To be published March 10, 2026.

4 stars

Great book with a terrible title. I’m not sure if this is YA, but I don’t think so. It’s 1928 and we follow a group of girls at Briarley, a boarding school in England . These are the sixth formers, the oldest girls in the school and they are all 17 and 18. Chief among them is Emily Locke who is floored when her best friend and star of the school, Violet, dies on her 18th birthday. After that Emily, and her rival, Evelyn, believe that Violet’s death wasn’t natural and they and their friends set out to prove it as things at the school get worse and worse.

Such a lovely sense of menace here. There’s no escape for anyone and it feels so claustrophobic. The whole thing is deliciously dark, plus, boarding school! I really enjoyed this.

[Baba Yaga Reads · Rating 3 out of 5]

Help! The rotting corpse of the British Empire is killing the girls!

[Fiona MacDonald · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVED THIS. Enid Blyton charm with horror. Perfect!

[Hester · Rating 5 out of 5]

You may think this is going to be very good, and if so I want you to prepare yourself; it's better than that.

[eliza tiffany · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was a beautifully written horror story following a series of suspicious deaths at a boarding school in the early 1900s. full of séances, a complicated haunting, and witty spirits, this book left me unsettled and looking over my shoulder and jumping at the little noises in my house.

there are quite a few characters, each well thought out, unique in her personality, bringing something essential to their little group. none of them truly felt like side characters, which i appreciated and am impressed by.

the enemies to lovers story is incredibly compelling, with bits and pieces you cling to while their world seems to be coming to a terrifying end. sapphics would love this one.

thank you NetGalley and Doubleday Books for the eARC in exchange for an honest review!

[Azhar · Rating 3 out of 5]

unless i’m stupid but i don’t think we ever really get any answers to the hauntings?? also, the book takes its sweet time getting to the good part and just when it does, it ends?? the prose was great but not great enough to save the story :(


thanking netgalley & the publishers for the ARC.

[eden]

everyday horror of coming of age and the fucked up ordeal of girls’ schools #seated

[Casey Bee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a sapphic gothic with all the vibes! Set in the 1920s at an all-girls boarding school, the sudden death of popular girl Violet shakes the campus. The spreading grief transforms into something darker as unsettling events take over campus. Illness, food spoiling, a sense of dread and something sinister at play. This book is a slow-burn and super atmospheric. There is this queer longing and competitive streak among the girls woven all throughout. This adds to the already high tension of events and supernatural mystery. It's a little crazy friends! But this blurring of lines between a psychological decay, and actual otherworldly elements, was my favorite part. It's eerie and atmospheric and even a bit scandalous. I really enjoyed it, I was in the right mood for this when I read it!

Read if you like:
Sapphic lit
Dark academia
Supernatural elements
Heavy atmosphere
Slow-burn horror

[Elle G. Reads · Rating 3 out of 5]

Spoiled Milk is a historical horror novel about a group of girls at a female only boarding school who begin to experience a series of strange occurrences and deaths. The novel has a few spooky scenes, one which managed to give me chills, and an interesting cast of characters who I believe were written perfectly for the novel. The author wrote them exceptionally well for the era and I was able to easily immerse myself in their story. I also found the atmosphere to be perfect! It gave all the gothic vibes. My main issue with the story though is that we never get an explanation as to WHY these things are happening. Readers can infer (I’m assuming it has something to do with the house’s history) but that’s never explicitly told to us. Perhaps it was written this way FOR the atmosphere, but my preference is to know WHY things are happening. It felt like it truly came out of nowhere. Other than that, I found this to be a solid read. I enjoyed learning about the relationships between these characters and thought the ending was good.

𝗠𝗬 𝗥𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗡𝗚: ⭐⭐⭐ (3.5 stars)

[Ann (Inky Labyrinth) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sad, slow, and sapphic horror lovers rejoice--this was incredible!!! Oh, my heart!

Definitely for fans of Private Rites.

[thetinydemon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved the setting, the girls school and the victorian era spiritualism, which both felt a bit like relics, even in the late 1920s timeframe. I became completely engrossed in these characters, who were all so clearly drawn, especially Emily, who was not a terribly likeable heroine, and Evelyn, who was equally thorny and wonderful. You cared about each one of these women, and It hurt to lose them. The spectre of Violet hovering over all of them, the teachers who seemed completely ill-prepared to think of these young women as people... The ill-fitting gender roles and curdled sense of national pride that was being foisted onto these women... It was all really interesting. I'm not sure how well I think the climax worked-- it seemed to clash with the atmospheric spookiness of the rest of the novel, but the coda was really satisfying for me.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC!

[Julia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m really sad about this book, it seemed like something that would really be a hit for me but unfortunately it fell flat. We follow 6 girls in 1928 at a boarding school directly following the death of their classmate Violet. The girls then turn to spiritualism in hopes to get answers as to how she died but instead they receive a warning: something is coming.

From the premise I was expecting a quite tense and eerie book, but instead it kind of meandered around with hints of terror and random off-page deaths that seemed more for shock value than moving the haunting forward. Unfortunately, I had little to no attachment to the characters as they were all a bit one dimensional, so their deaths weren’t very impactful. I found myself often getting the characters (apart from Emily and Evelyn) confused a bit.

Throughout the entire book my one questions was really why? Why is this happening? Why here? Why are the main 6 girls not being effected by the haunting in the same way as everyone else? One of the characters even questions this towards the end of the book but unfortunately no one ever really receives an answer. Unless I missed it somewhere.

I do feel like this premise has a lot of promise - the last 15% when the haunting really started ramping up was quite engaging. I just wish I hadn’t had to get through the other 85% to get there. I kept thinking that maybe this was not the medium that this story needed to be told in. Perhaps this could make an interesting movie.

Ultimately this was an ambitious debut, but I’m be curious to see what Avery Curran gets up to next.

Thank you to Quercus Books and NetGalley for the ARC.

[maya · Rating 5 out of 5]

so good. made in a lab for me specifically.

the horror of a coming of age, but specifically a lesbian one, of realizing the environment you love and consider home is now at odds with who’ve you turned out to be. the horror of your home suddenly becoming inhospitable, of the fear that every other place on earth is built off of the institutional frameworks that seek to oppress you. RAHHHHH!!!

seeing two common criticisms of this i want to defend:
1. “it’s boring” it’s a 1920s boarding school gothic. you’re getting exactly what it says on the tin. curran emulates the historical voice of these type of novels incredibly well. this is historical gothic take ur tik tok rotted ass attention span back to thrillers
2. “the haunting is never explained/this isn’t about anything” now me personally i’d be embarrassed to admit online that i have the intellectual curiosity and reading comprehension skills of a high schooler or perhaps a bored frat bro forced to take an english gen ed at a state school but the rest of us are having too good of a time with what curran did here re: lesbianism and the rot and death of an empire to care rlly…

[mj · Rating 2 out of 5]

it definitely had its creepy moments, but ultimately it did not deliver on a single one of its promises (for me). lesbian boarding school horror of my dreams my ass and left foot!

[Book Riot Community]

Book Riot’s Most Anticipated Books of 2026:

Sapphic gothic novels are having a moment, and I am here for it. I can't resist the combination of sapphic longing and a creeping sense of doom. At Briarley School for Girls in 1928, something sinister is spreading, rotting meat and curdling milk. Then the body count begins to climb. Emily is convinced her captivating classmate Violet's death was not natural, and she intends to prove it. She teams up with rival Evelyn to try to contact Violet from beyond the veil. Through the medium of Evelyn, Violet warns that the danger has only begun. This promises "teenage repression, queer desire, and the everyday horror of coming of age." —Danika Ellis

[Celine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one is tough for me to rate. It has absolutely everything that I want in a book: a girl's boarding school during the Victorian age, séances, teen girls behaving strangely, paranormal activity, mysterious deaths, queer coming of age - the list goes on.

And yet, the pacing was a drag. I really struggled to get into it, every single time I picked it up, which resulted in me skimming towards the end.

I would read more from this author, and I genuinely hope for the book's success. I was charmed by it, deeply, at the beginning. Maybe this is a me problem - a classic case of right book, wrong time.

Regardless, thank you to the publisher for an early copy, in exchange for a review!

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

A delectable romp; a gothic banquet of rot and radiance, set within a 1928 English boarding school where order curdles into menace. The story opens with Violet— beloved, envied, impossible to look away from— plunging to her death on her eighteenth birthday. In this absence, her fellow classmates (some rivals by instinct, companions by necessity) are drawn into an uncanny undertow. Something festers within the school’s walls: spoiled food, creeping fevers, ghostly murmurs, and secrets that cannot remain contained.

What distinguishes this debut is not only the knife sharp atmosphere, though dread shimmers in every shadow, it is Curran’s ability to braid horror with longing, to render spiritualism and decay as mirrors of adolescence itself. Through Emily’s narration— selfish, dedicated, brimming with contradiction— what’s captured is the raw disorder of desire in a world obsessed with obedience and appearance. The supernatural is never an intrusion from elsewhere; it seeps into the minerals of the soil the school stands upon, until hunger, grief, and queerness feel as spectral as any haunting. Above all, is the intrinsic relatability, the timeless experience and dynamics of teenage girls.

Curran reclaims the well-worn trope of the boarding school novel and sets it on fire, transforming a cloistered institution into a crucible of repression, empire, and awakening. The effect is both chilling and tender: a book where beauty and grotesquerie sit at the same table, where terror is breaking bread with restlessness. Spoiled Milk endures not for the phantoms it conjures, but for its understanding that fear lives also in the ache of desire, the cruelty of authority, and the fragile dread of being young, alive, and filled with love to give (and consume).

Thank you, Netgalley & Double Day, for the advance reminder that horror and yearning, when done with a skillful touch, can be the most fun a girl can have.

[Hutton Laine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gothic, historical horror, rot, the ✨gays✨, slow burn. This book was right up my alley. A girls boarding school from the 1920’s doing spooky shit, HELL YEAH. A decaying building slugging away, HELL YES. A bunch of weird gay girlies summoning ghosts/demons, HELLLLL YEAAAAH BROTHER. The slow pace of this book really added to an atmospheric element, to the rot inside. I loved it. The ending did leave me with questions, but realizing this is going to be part of a series, has me ready to pick up the next.

Thank you author, publishers, and NetGalley for this ARC
🖤

[Aubrei K (earlgreypls) · Rating 4 out of 5]

yea i ate this up. it’s a true gothic and gives me major Rebecca vibes

[J. L. R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran is a horror novel set in the Briarley School for Girls, an all-girls boarding school in England in the 1920s. The book opens with the sudden, inexplicable death of Violet, the queen bee of the school and object of obsession by our narrator, Emily Locke. Emily becomes convinced that Violet’s death was at the hands of their young French teacher, Mademoiselle, whose close relationship with Violet has been gnawing on Emily’s psyche for months. Emily begins a crusade to avenge Violet’s murder, recruiting as many of her classmates as she can. But Violet’s death is just the beginning of a series of hauntings and tragedies to be inflicted on the girls of Briarley. Soon the food starts rotting.

Rot is a very particular kind of corruption. It’s not simply damage, or sickness, or some other kind of potentially curable affliction. Rot is the hidden reality of something already being irredeemably gone. It’s death before the heart stops. The curse of Briarley manifests first in spoiled food, even in things that look normal and delicious on the surface. But like everything else, the adults in power simply try to keep calm and carry on, and demanding the girls do the same. All while the rot grows.

Reading this, I couldn’t help but think about the pandemic, about how the world has mostly tried to move on and repress the grief and paranoia that’s already made so much of us insane. We’ve never really grappled with the scale of the death - instead, governments and corporations rushed to bring us back to normal as soon as possible. There’s no space in this world for grief. As the tragedies continue in Briarley, the girls are given less and less space to grieve, until no one even mentions all that they’ve suffered. With no direction or space to process the magnitude of their loss, Emily and the girls turn to other, more occult solutions to their problems.

Spoiled Milk’s haunted rot isn’t subtle. It’s a clear metaphor - that’s made pretty explicit as the book goes on - for the rot at the heart of the British Empire, and by extension, its rogue child, the USA. The book argues that our world’s greatest Empire is already rotted, and all attempts to smooth over, ignore, or reform it are doomed to fail. It’s already dead. Maybe the girls of Briarley are doomed from the start.

But doom isn’t the only thing repressed by Emily and the girls at Briarley. There’s a clear current of queer desire throughout the cast of characters, with none more clearly repressing than Emily herself, who lashes out at the merest suggestion that her feelings towards Violet are anything other than platonic, who finds herself literally unable to think of the obvious truth. These feelings for each other serve as foil to the rot - actively repressed, impossible to truly change, yet liberatory instead of damning.

Emily is a fun protagonist - she’s mean, she’s selfish, she lies to herself and everyone else around her, and yet she does grow to care for her friends, a cast of characters who rarely grow far beyond their archetypes but are still compelling. It’s the central plot that feels a little underwhelming. There’s rarely a moment of true surprise, as the girls fall through the same rhythms and strategies while one by one, their problems get worse. It’s not very scary, though has it has a couple creepy images, and like many horror-ish books, it builds towards an action-y climax that feels at odds with the rest of the book and like something I’ve read and seen before many times. The prose is relatively straightforward, and I never got the deeper read into Emily and her friends’ psyche that I wanted.

All that said, Spoiled Milk is still a quick, fun read, especially if you’re drawn to the story of these young women trying to grieve their losses and solve their problems in a world that tells them to ignore their desires and their feelings and simply think of old England.

Thanks to NetGalley for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts expressed are my own.

['*•.¸♡ nay♡¸.•*' · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I first read the description of this book I was beyond thrilled. I mean, this has everything that I love in a book. It’s gothic, queer, haunted, and set at an all girls school (one of my fav settings!)
I liked the storytelling and overall ‘voice’ of the author, and I found all of the characters to be compelling even when they were a little unlikable (especially Emily who is our pov) it has a cast of quite a few different girls but I felt like the author did a great job of distinguishing them. I definitely had feelings and opinions about each of them! (Marion was a fav of mine!) Some of the school teachers were blending together, but that didn’t take away from the plot or my enjoyment of it.
I noticed a lot of reviews point out pacing problems. I thought the pacing was fine, and I especially liked that the beginning of the book got straight to the point. There were a few moments when the action sort of lagged, but I still think it chugged along at a pace perfectly reasonable to build suspense.
Well, the problem I had with this book is that it never explains the haunting aspect. To be honest it feels like lazy writing to give no explanation for the deaths, rotting, possession, haunting etc and when the characters inevitably “end” the whole affair there is no reason as to why what they did worked. I enjoy other works that have unexplained aspects, but this one did not work for me. I just felt that after ALL THAT I deserved to know why I went through it all.
I still enjoyed the book and I would certainly recommend it to anyone who thinks it sounds interesting, but unfortunately the ambiguous aspect of the story took away from my overall enjoyment of the book.

[hunter · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars. you ever read a book that is so incredibly boring that when it starts to get interesting you can’t even bring yourself to keep reading? that’s what this book did for me. gothic horror takes a minute to get exciting, i get that, but it should not have taken as long as it did.

the premise of this book was so exciting for me. an all girls school dealing with a haunting and there’s lesbianism sprinkled in? sign me up. except there wasn’t a whole lot of haunting and the lesbians weren’t even enjoyable characters. all of the characters weren’t interesting actually. our narrator, emily, is probably the worst of them all.

i loved the start; the most loved girl in their class suddenly dies and, all of a sudden, strange occurrences happen. food starts to spoil, more strange deaths happen, and seances are performed to figure out what the hell is going on. that unfortunately never gets answered. there was no actual conclusion as to who or what was causing all of this. there was no spooky history behind the school or cursed objects that were messed with. violet doesn’t even know who pushed her to her death. the book ends with an out of nowhere romance of sorts and… that’s about it. i wanted to like this so bad but it was just boring at the end of the day.

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 1 out of 5]

There are so many levels at which this novel fails:

1. As a queer story: the narrative is not interested enough in engaging with mores surrounding queer people in England in the early 20th century, and its queer themes are treated as outside of the real narrative; although at first it seems to be trying to do something to marry the horror themes with sublimated lesbian desire, it never fully achieves it, and indeed, seems to forget about it.
2. As a 1920s England pastiche. Spoiled Milk never gets the register of language right, or the details of dialogue or social life, or the reality of interpersonal relationships. I don't understand why American authors insist on writing a Fake England, when there are so many pitfalls, and they could just write something set in 1920s US. Is it because they don't want to deal with the racism and injustice of their own country, so it's easier to set something in the imagined past of a different country?
3. As a horror novel. The idea of less being more never seems to occur to the author; the horror and gore keep getting ratcheted up and up until they loose all power and tension; when we get to the zombie denouement it just seems ridiculous.

[Karina (shedreamsinwords) · Rating 2 out of 5]

This story takes place in 1928 at an all girls boarding school when one of the students falls to her death. That sets off a sequence of weird happenings, a few seance’s, some paranormal oddities, and even more deaths throughout the school. The eldest students are left to find out what is sweeping through the school and leading to all these strange deaths.

I’m so bummed because this story had the rich atmosphere filled with that usual gothic tension in the air, but the biggest problem I had is that we never got a reason as to why things happened in the first place. I don’t mind ambiguity but I felt that this book needed to give answers that never came, even in the end.

I would still be interested in checking out more from the author in the future.

[Toribetweenpages · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank you to Netgalley and Doubleday books for an e-arc edition.

Cover 10/10

The description checked so many boxes for me: gothic, queer, coming of age, but I don't think the summary vs. execution matched up perfectly.

Queer relationships are mentioned but not much actually happening on page for us to experience our characters' queerness or exploring sexuality. It's really on the periphery of the story. The characters are the age to justify coming of age, but they're not dealing with coming of age problems because they're all consumed by the deaths at the school.

The creepy scenes pulled me back into the story, but they were very spread out in the beginning and the characters didn't keep my interest in the in-between.

[Maddi Harwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25⭐️ I really enjoyed this, definitely my kind of book. A group of girls at a boarding school get their hands on a spell book and everything goes sideways? Sign me tf up. Add in a sapphic coming-of-age story, and I’m sold.

The writing did feel a bit scattered at times, which wasn’t my favorite, but overall this was a fun read.

[Rusha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Girls from boarding school are built different (they choose to stay back after witnessing some scary shit)