When I began reading Plain Bad Heroines, I couldn’t wait to get started on designing the cover. It’s a funny and clever American Gothic novel with a queer twist, and I’d never read anything like it before.

The book takes us to 1902, at an all girl’s boarding school in Rhode Island, where students Flo and Clara are madly in love with each other, as well as completely obsessed with The Story of Mary MacLane, a scandalous debut memoir. A copy of the book is found splayed in the woods near the two girls’ dead bodies after a horrific wasp attack. Within five years, The Brookhants School for Girls is closed. But not before three more people died on the property, each in a troubling way.