In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Avery Curran’s novel Spoiled Milk is an impressive debut, a queer Gothic horror masterpiece.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“Queerness weaves through the novel like an inversion of the rot spreading through the school. . . The use of foreshadowing effectively builds tension and dread . . . the novel’s true strength is exploring the complex relationships among the girls—both living and dead—and the unknowns of the world. A queer, eerie debut.”
In her own words, here is Avery Curran’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Spoiled Milk:
I have the sort of taste in music where once when I was ten, I went to a friend’s karaoke birthday party and chose to sing Mika’s ‘Grace Kelly’, a song I had never heard before, because I really liked High Society (1956). Which is to say that 1) I know very little about music, and 2) when I like something good it’s often by accident. Writing fiction has been surprisingly transformative to my relationship with music, though, because I use playlists to work through questions of character and theme, and to provide a mental shortcut to the world I’m writing about. So here we are: these are some of the songs on the playlist I made while I was writing Spoiled Milk. Spoiled Milk is a gothic horror novel set in 1928, in a girls’ school where a student named Violet has died suddenly. Her best friend, Emily, thinks her death was no accident, and when the girls turn to spiritualism for answers, they instead receive dire warnings. The novel is about teenage repression; lesbian longing; the hauntings at the heart of Englishness; the way you can realise too late that you never had a chance.
“Я сошла с ума”: t.A.T.u.
I first heard this song when I was maybe fifteen years old and it blew my mind. I somehow hadn’t realised you could write a song about lesbians. I had been one for a while already but the thought of making art about it was totally opaque to me. I had just started learning Russian in school and so I spent a lot of time listening to the Russian-language version, with the air of someone about to tell you that actually reading something in translation could never capture the nuances of the original. There aren’t many nuances to capture here, though: a line in the chorus translates to ‘Situation “help”, situation “SOS”’, which is not exactly deathless prose. But the hysterical repetition, the nonsensical asides, these capture with uncanny precision the feeling of being a teenager in love—and, most importantly, the conviction that this love is going to fuck things up for you in a big way. The terrors of being a teenager are a major part of Spoiled Milk. These characters don’t understand what they’re feeling and why, but they know enough to be pretty certain that none of it can be good. And so it was the most natural thing on earth to drag myself back to being fifteen, and confused, and often frightened; t.A.T.u. got me there.
“White Winter Hymnal”: Fleet Foxes
I love this song because it never gives you any answers. It’s impressionistic and oblique, with the fairy-tale elements of white snow and something—precisely what is undisclosed—as red as strawberries, and scarves tied round necks in order to stop heads falling off. I put it in the playlist I listened to while I was writing Spoiled Milk because I wanted to be forced to remember that I was writing about children. The main characters in my novel are seventeen and eighteen, yes, but they’re infantilised by their environment and there are points in the progression of events where they look up and think, suddenly, no—I’m a child—how can this be happening to me? ‘White Winter Hymnal’ lulls you with its echoing, almost Christmassy sound, but when you listen closer it’s upsettingly evocative of inexplicable and probably very bad things happening to children. A pack of girls, all in matching pinafores, walking in crocodile lines—they’re on the precipice of adulthood, but they aren’t there yet.
“Miss World”: Hole
This is a Violet song, for me. One of the Violet songs, which include ‘The Infanta’ by The Decemberists, and ‘Cheerleader’ by St. Vincent, and ‘Laura Palmer’s Theme’ by Angelo Badalamenti. Violet dies very early on, but she haunts the whole novel both literally and figuratively. She’s a deliberately referential character, one in a long line of fucked-up blondes whose conventional beauty belies both their suffering and their flaws. ‘Miss World’ gets at her loneliness, her resentment, and her doom.
“Autoclave”: The Mountain Goats
If ‘Miss World’ is a Violet song, then ‘Autoclave’ is an Emily song. Emily is the protagonist of Spoiled Milk, a devotee whose object of devotion has been taken from her. She’s so twisted up by her shame and anger that she no longer knows how to behave: as John Darnielle puts it in ‘Autoclave’, she’s a ‘great, unstable mass of blood and foam / And no emotion that’s worth having could call my heart its home’. Briarley School for Girls is a pressure cooker, an autoclave, inhospitable and intolerable—and so, sometimes, is Emily.
“Spellbound”: Siouxsie and the Banshees
I think not having control over yourself is one of the scariest things there is. Maybe that’s too psychologically revealing about myself, but there’s so many ways this can be drawn out in fiction and it only feels honest to admit that in this novel I took this fear of mine and ran with it. In Spoiled Milk, characters are spoken through by spirits without their knowledge or approval, or they find themselves enacting the will of some intangible, malevolent force. Or, more prosaically, they act on desires that terrify them because the pull towards each other is so strong. ‘Spellbound’ could be about any of this. It has the force of a freight train and seems to carry you along with its relentless driving energy whether you like it or not.
“Transcendental Youth”—The Mountain Goats
‘Transcendental Youth’ makes me think of every place I’ve simultaneously loved and hated. Hated badly enough to burn it down and leave it forever—“Cold through broken baseboards / I despise this town”. But those places leave their mark on you, and no matter how much you were glad to be well shot of them, you’ll find yourself returning, if only in memory. “Sing high, while the fire climbs / Sing one for the old times.” I can’t say more without spoiling it, but this one was important.
“Death Is Not the End”: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
This may seem unrelentingly literal, as a song choice for a novel about spiritualism, but I think there’s more to it than that. I think often about what we are supposed to fear; that’s natural, I imagine, for a writer who’s in the business of scaring people. One of my favourite movies, Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak, executes a clever manoeuvre in which the viewer slowly learns that the shrieking, bleeding spectres aren’t, in fact, what the protagonist ought to be afraid of after all. So often, the things we’re told to fear aren’t what will really hurt us—and so often it’s precisely what we’re told will keep us safe that ends up being dangerous, like the institution of the family, or the police. In this novel, the ghosts aren’t the real threat, and there are worse things than death.
“Nearer My God to Thee”: The Newton Brothers
This is the only piece of music I’m writing about actually to feature by name in the book. When I made my playlist, I was more interested in gathering emotional resonances and matching mood than period flavour—but this was a natural exception. Hymns are a biggish part of the novel, because the rhythms of school life dictate where my characters are and what they’re doing at any given time. These girls aren’t people who have a lot of control over themselves, and I mean that both in terms of their ability to handle their own emotions and in terms of the extent to which they’re able to manage their own lives. So they sing hymns when the schoolday demands it, and they wake up when the morning bell rings, and they generally go where they’re told—until they don’t. They sing ‘Nearer my God to Thee’ to commemorate a death. It is, for once, a choice the girls make for themselves rather one that’s made for them.
I chose this version because it’s what I listened to on repeat for a few hours during a sticky hot night at the end of August 2022. I was eating a popsicle and wearing a nightgown, and writing the climax of Spoiled Milk all in one go. My flat is in an old building that was intended to keep as much warmth in as possible, and by the end of the summer I’m wilted and miserable from the accumulated heat, which is an ideal environment for a certain kind of delirium. It’s not traditional, as hymn recordings go, but it’s still perfect: the imperfections, the points where the voices don’t blend quite right, the slow gathering of more and more singers towards a final note that never comes.
Avery Curran studied history at university, where she first became interested in spiritualism. She finished an M.A. in Victorian studies in 2021, and is now midway through a Ph.D. 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.