Talking Scared
Talking Scared
Neil McRobert
271 – Avery Curran & The Naughtiest Ghosts in School
1 hour 30 minutes Posted Mar 10, 2026 at 6:00 pm.
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Show notes

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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