Book Review: Spoiled Milk

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 only 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 the 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.

Published by: Doubleday
Publication Date: March 10, 2026

Shop The Book: Spoiled Milk
Shop My Stack: 2026 Books Read

There are some books you pick up because they look interesting, and then there are the ones that feel like they were made for you.

Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran was one of those for me.

I chose this as an Aardvark Book Club pick after seeing it surface on Bookstagram for a while, and I could not get past the cover and the synopsis. It gave this very specific feeling of an old black and white gothic horror film, something eerie and atmospheric with just enough mystery to pull you in. I was hoping it would lean into that tone, and it absolutely did.

Story Structure

This story is set in a 1928 religious girls’ boarding school, where a group of girls find themselves thrown together whether they like each other or not. There is already tension between them from the beginning, the kind that comes from being forced into close proximity with people you do not fully trust. When a popular student dies under suspicious circumstances, everything that was already fragile starts to shift.

What unfolds is not just a mystery, but a slow unraveling of relationships, identities, and reality itself.

Reading Experience

One of the things I loved most about this book is that it refuses to explain itself. The horror is not clearly defined. It does not follow rules, and it does not stop to justify what is happening. Instead, it exists in the same way it does in older horror films, where something is simply wrong and you are left to feel it rather than understand it. There is rot here. There are hallucinations and hauntings. There is something unholy pressing into the walls of the school and into the lives of the girls, and the less it is explained, the more unsettling it becomes.

Because of that, the focus stays exactly where it should be, on the characters.

Characters

The girls at the center of this story have a dynamic that feels both familiar and deeply uncomfortable. There is affection between them, but it is tangled up with distrust, jealousy, and things left unsaid. It has that recognizable energy of girls who are close because they have to be, not because it is easy. At times it reminded me of the kind of tension you see in stories like Gossip Girl or Mean Girls or Pretty Little Liars, but here it is darker, quieter, and more fragile.

Tone

There is also a layer of repression that runs through everything. The school itself creates an environment where certain feelings are not allowed, not spoken about, and not even acknowledged. That denial becomes its own kind of prison, trapping these girls in relationships and emotions they do not know how to process. You can feel that tension in every interaction, and it adds so much depth to the story.

The narration brings in a sharp, almost darkly funny edge at times, which only makes the heavier moments land harder. You find yourself growing attached to these characters, understanding them, and then watching as everything around them begins to fall apart.

This is not a gentle story.

It builds your affection for these girls and then does not hesitate to take that away from you. It is dark and unsettling and, at times, genuinely disturbing. There is a heaviness to it, something sticky and foggy that lingers even when you are not reading. It feels immersive in a way that is almost overwhelming, but in the best possible sense.

The best way I can describe it is that it feels almost nauseating in how deeply it pulls you in. It is intense and emotional and completely absorbing, and I never once felt like I needed more explanation to stay invested. I cared about what was happening to these girls. I cared about how their relationships were shifting under pressure. I cared about whether any of them were going to make it out of this at all.

That is what made it so effective.

Final Thoughts

This is easily one of the best books I have read in a long time, and that is saying a lot because I have read quite a few five star books recently. There is something about this style of storytelling, something atmospheric and character driven and a little bit unexplainable, that just works for me every time.

If you love gothic horror, dark academia, messy and complicated relationships, and stories that trust you to sit in the unknown, I would absolutely recommend picking this up.

Just know going in that it is not for the faint of heart.

It is dark. It is emotional. It is unsettling.

And it is going to stay with me for a very long time.

👉 Grab your Aardvark Book Club pick here: Book Box

Avery Curran is a writer and researcher. She studied History at university, where she first became interested in spiritualism. She finished an MA in Victorian Studies in 2021, and has 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. Her first novel, Spoiled Milk, a lesbian gothic horror novel set in the 1920s, is forthcoming in March 2026 with riverrun (UK), Doubleday (US), and Penguin Random House Canada.