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“Pain is meant to take up space or else we wouldn’t know how to scream.”

Author: CG Drews

Evander’s past sticks in him like broken shards: half formed and half seen memories of unthinkable violence. A young blond boy, a playmate, a shovel, so much blood and viscera spilling out. And now, forever an invalid, Evander is nearly grown, secreted away in his room turned prison in the Hazelthorn estate, hidden by his billionaire guardian, Byron Lennox-Hall. He is also hidden from Hall’s beautiful, deadly grandson – Laurie – the playmate who took adventure and transformed it into attempted murder.

Laurie, it seems, lives free and happy on the estate. Evander watches him from the window, feeling rage and bitterness and an odd longing. But Laurie must stay locked away for his own good. This stasis, this staying in protection, this feverish swoop from surgery to recovery to drugged out safety, keeps Evander somehow alive and keeps his mysterious fits at bay. But all that is about to change.

When Evander’s guardian dies, poisoned, and the butler turned jailkeeper disappears, the estranged family descends. Evander is now free to wonder about the property, to meet and talk with the idle boy who began his suffering, and to search for answers to his guardian’s demise. What he finds is a complicated, pulpy web of rot, interrelated fragments of greed and desire, secrecy and success, violence and veneer. His memories, it seems, tell only a partial picture, and when he ends up inheriting all of the estate, he goes from curious to target in an instance. Now he must team with his would-be murderer, Laurie, to find answers before it’s too late.

Hazelthorn is an atmospheric, macabre romp through a gothic garden, teeming with spores and poison and choking, cloying vines. It captures the mood of a place, transforming setting into irresistible character; before the action even begins, we’re already invested in this plant infested world with its decaying mansion and blood-drenched soil. Something nefarious is there, clawing just beneath the surface of the roiling dirt, and we love it for its danger tinted beauty, its neediness and violent desire for retribution. The garden is alive, and its secrets are spilling.

Image by Square Frog from Pixabay

Evander is your typical YA narrator: unreliable and emotional, oscillating between a learned fragility and a newer bravery. He doesn’t make the best decisions. Indeed, he makes all of the worst possible decisions, from the usual let’s make-out instead of saving ourselves from imminent threats to the ill-fated and poorly constructed investigation into his obviously belligerent guardian’s murder. Instead of being irritating though, this naivety kind of works, especially with the foreseeable but no less heart-wrecking conclusion.

As for the “why” behind the villainy, Evander’s strange attraction to the boy who tried to kill him and the ominous luxuriance of foliage makes it oddly obvious. I figured it out fairly early on, but that honestly didn’t matter. Again, it worked with the arc of the narrative, with watching Evander come to his slow realization of just who he really is and why he is trapped among the Lennox-Halls. It makes the spooky and the mysterious and the heartbreaking just that much more powerful.

In the end, we get exactly what we want – near misses, agony, body horror, epic revenge, supernatural plants with a thirst for human flesh, and a doomed, inhuman love story. What more could you possibly want? In the end, the way the story was told, plus the writing and the atmosphere and the way the characters came alive, created an immersive, addicting experience. I will seek out more of CJ Drew’s dark, fairy-tale-like works.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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