Contents

Cover

Title Page

Map

Dedication

Epigraph

Part One: I Await the Devil’s Coming

Excerpt from The Story of Mary MacLane by Mary MacLane

One Macabre Afternoon to Begin

Meet Your Plain, Bad Heroines Three

About That Missing Copy of Mary MacLane’s Book

Tinseltown

How to Import a Martian into Your Contacts

And Now: A Strange and Ugly Thing That Happened in the Not-So-Distant Past as Told on the Internet Not Even an Hour After It Occurred

Harper Harper’s Costume Life in DTLA

Bodies Piling Up. Snow Piling Up. But Where to Place the Blame at Brookhants?

Across Town, a Scuttle

Playing Dress-Up Dinner

Whatever Happens: Know They’ll Always Have the Dumpsters

Gray Dawn, Bleak Mo[u]rning

The (Unofficial) Chemistry Read

Things Are Not All That Pleasant Out by Bo Dhillon’s Pool

The Happenings at Brookhants—Audition Scene 2

Our Three Heroines Alone Together at Last

The (Real) Chemistry Read

Fin De Siècle Meet Cute

Harper and Merritt Go on an Impossible Los Angeles Date

Libbie Brookhants Takes a Bath

Interlude: Side Talks with Girls

Side Talk #1: Bo Dhillon Makes His Case

Side Talk #2: Harold Brookhants Makes His Case

Part Two: The Happenings at Brookhants

What to Make of This Arrangement?

Alex Sees Things in Stereoview

Typist’s Block

The Players Assemble

An Undesirable Morbidness

Road Apples

Trifle with the Trifle

Even in East Bumblebuzzard, Rhode Island

A Tower Tour, a Carpet Picnic, a Sound in the Night

Finally, Someone Tends to Those Fucking Plants

No More Necks

Tricky Thicket

Apple Bruise

Updates from the Set of The Happenings at Brookhants as Told Online

Uh-Oh, It’s Magic

Ava in the Orchard

Providence

Elaine Brookhants, Socialite and Philanthropist, Dies at Age 81

Esse Quam Videri

The Red Carpet After

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Emily M. Danforth

Copyright

About the Publisher