271 – Avery Curran & The Naughtiest Ghosts in School

Time for sex and seances this week on Talking Scared.

Our guest is Avery Curran and her debut novel Spoiled Milk. It’s a story of spiritualism and sapphic desire, set in a 1920s boarding school where death, rot, haunting and much worse things (patriarchy!) runs rampant.

Avery is a specialist in the history of spiritualism (with a brand new PhD to her name) and this conversation is a deep and deeply enjoyable route through all of her books haunted classrooms.

It’s one of those episodes when we ALL learn something, listeners.

Enjoy!

Other books mentioned:

• The Wells of Loneliness (1928), by Radclyffe Hall
• “The Female World of Love and Ritual” (2006,) by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg
• Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), by Eve Kososfky-Sedgewick
• IT (1986), by Stephen King
• The Haunting of Alma Fielding (2021), by Kate Summerscale
• Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower (2020), by Tamsyn Muir
• A Canticle for Liebowitz (1959), by Walter M. Miller Jr

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