TL;DR: Spoiled Milk is a boarding school novel with its teeth bared. Avery Curran’s debut takes the genteel gothic tradition, shoves a maggot into its mouth, and makes it swallow. The séance scenes are some of the best supernatural horror I’ve read in years, the prose is immaculate, and the ending hits like a house fire. Vicious, tender, absolutely disgusting.

When our narrator, Emily Locke, bites into an apple during a midnight feast and feels something wriggling against her tongue. She spits it out. A maggot, white and impossibly clean, writhes in a mush of rancid fruit. The apple looked perfect from the outside. This is a metaphor, and the fact that it’s obvious doesn’t make it less effective, because Curran isn’t hiding the ball. She’s showing it to you and then smashing it against the wall.

Set in 1928 at Briarley School for Girls, an isolated English boarding school built on the profits of the Barbadian sugar trade, the novel opens with the death of Violet Kirsch, golden girl of the upper sixth, who falls from a landing on the night of her eighteenth birthday. Emily, who loved Violet with a devotion she can’t fully name, becomes ferociously certain that the young French schoolmistress killed her. What follows is a ghost story, a mystery, a horror novel about decay, and one of the most precisely observed accounts of queer adolescent desire I’ve encountered.

Emily is not a reliable narrator, and the book knows it, and Emily does not know it, and this tension is where the whole thing lives and breathes. She catalogues Violet’s every gesture with a lover’s attention while insisting her feelings are perfectly normal schoolgirl devotion. She bullies Evelyn, her rival, with a viciousness she frames as justice. Curran writes her with such unflinching specificity that I kept pausing to stare at the ceiling. The prose mimics Emily’s voice perfectly: clipped and confident when she’s in control, tangled and defensive when she’s not, threaded through with period-appropriate diction that never reads like costume.

The pacing does dawdle in places. The second act cycles through séances and arguments that cover ground already established, and some charming digressions into school life could’ve been trimmed without losing anything essential. It’s a debut-novel problem, the instinct to linger because the world is so fully built. There were pages where the engine idled before the book remembered it had somewhere terrifying to be.

Where the pacing holds, though, it holds like a goddamn vise. The séance scenes are extraordinary. When Mrs. Northcote’s spirit control arrives and then something goes wrong, when the voice degenerates from sweetness into a grinding metallic garble, the texture is so physical you can feel it in your teeth. Later, when Evelyn begins channeling Violet involuntarily, floating off the ground, begging not to let “her” in, the horror isn’t the spectacle but the terrible intimacy of watching someone become a vessel for someone you loved. The supernatural in this book isn’t separate from the characters’ emotional lives. It is their emotional lives, made literal, made disgusting.

Avery Curran is a New York-born, London-based writer and researcher whose academic work feeds directly into this novel’s veins. She studied history at university, completed an MA in Victorian Studies in 2021, and is now pursuing a PhD on queerness in nineteenth-century spiritualism. Before that, she worked at a publisher and archive centered around a Swedish mystic, which is one of those biographical details that makes you go, “Oh, so that’s why the séance scenes feel like that.” Spoiled Milk is her debut, acquired by riverrun in a four-way auction. Curran has described it as being about “girls, ghosts, gore, and the rot at the heart of Englishness,” which is accurate but undersells how tender it is. The scholarship doesn’t sit on top of the story like frosting. It runs through the whole thing structurally, load-bearing. You can feel the research without ever feeling lectured at, which is a hell of a trick for a first book.

What makes Spoiled Milk excellent rather than merely good is how completely it understands what it’s actually about. Emily is so convinced that Mademoiselle is a predatory deviant that she can’t see what’s in front of her: her own love for Violet was the same species of feeling she’s been taught to revile. Briarley itself, built on sugar money and slave labor, is an institution whose foundation is rot. The horror that consumes it isn’t an invasion from outside. It’s an expression of what was always there. Curdled milk, maggots in fruit, bodies that fall in the exact same position. The school is digesting itself.

Some images I’ll be carrying around for a while: Mr. Kirsch leaning too close to Evelyn at the memorial reception, his mouth at her ear, and the milk jug overturning like a body flinching in the only way it can. Marion standing with her face to the wall of a dirty classroom because a teacher has lost her mind, chin held high and shoulders rigid. The sound of a gramophone playing hymns by itself until Marion smashes it with a cricket bat. And Evelyn, floating and terrified, her voice cracking on the word “sin,” because the ghost of the girl she loved is trying to climb inside her and she thinks wanting it makes her damned. That last one made me want to lie face-down on the floor for twenty minutes, and I mean that as a compliment.

The ending is a conflagration, literally and emotionally, and it earns its heat. Emily and Evelyn’s relationship arrives somewhere that feels inevitable and hard-won and still uncertain enough to hurt. Curran doesn’t tie a bow on it. The final image is small and sensory and perfect and I’m not going to tell you what it is.

There are debuts that feel like promising drafts of the writer someone might become, and then there are debuts where the writer showed up fully formed and ready to bite. This is the second kind. It sags in the middle, a couple of secondary characters blur in the back half, and yeah, it repeats itself occasionally. But shit, those are quibbles. This book made me feel like something was crawling under my skin, and then it made me cry, and that’s a combination I will always show up for.