Synopsis:
Cordelia Beecher is on the run. In search of her missing brother Edward, she has fled the oppressive charity school she was raised in, desperate to find the only family she knows. Using clues from his past letters, she sets off for the sleepy town of Farrow but everyone there claims to have never heard of Edward—not even the man he was supposedly working for as an apprentice.
With nowhere to go, Cordi turns to Lady Evangeline, a local botanist who owns the magnificent Edenfield estate. The benevolent lady of the manor has made it her mission to take young, often traumatized, women into her employ and protect them from man’s world of wicked desires and deceits. Hired as a maid and companion to her enigmatic daughters, Prim and Briar, Cordi quickly settles into Edenfield. Even as her relationship with Briar blossoms, Cordi can’t help but suspect that there are secrets in the estate…and when she stumbles across evidence that Edward was once there, she’s determined to find answers.
Review:
Lush and languid, the very moment I cracked open Tanya Pell’s “Her Wicked Roots,” thick vines sprouted from my kindle’s charging port, snaked up my arms and tightened around them. Resistance was futile and unnecessary. A rather dramatic departure from Pell’s charmingly pulpy killer-VHS debut “Cicada,” “Her Wicked Roots,” is a full-blooded and enchanting gothic, that much like some of the flora it features, is beautiful and lethal in equal measure. Nothing short of spectacular, Pell’s latest is twisted, twisty, full of queer longing and chlorophyllic menace. It’s out October 7th from Gallery Books- thank you for my ARC.
Cordelia Beecher has at long last escaped the abusive charity school in which she has spent years- and not without a plan either. Having exchanged letters with her beloved older brother Edward, who was working as an apprentice to a Mr. Starling in the small town of Farrow, she heads there with some stolen cash and the few belongings she has. When she arrives at the Starling residence however, she is turned away, and told no Edward Beecher resides there. Impossible. Upon the hushed lead given by Alice Starling, the family’s youngest daughter, and in hope of food and shelter, Cordi heads to the Edenfield estate where the austere but benevolent Lady Evangeline takes her on as a maid, and companion to her two daughters. It seems however that not everything is quite right- the strange rules of the house, the bizarre family dynamic, the illness that seems to hang in the air- the knowledge that Edward was here, and still might be… forcing us to question whether Cordelia has found her home, or merely traded one captivity for another?
Horror generally, but particularly gothic horror is deeply entwined with love and romance, and Pell knows this well, placing it front and centre in “Her Wicked Roots.” Family love and the strange ways in which it can manifest- the thin line between caring and coddling, the lengths to which we are willing to go to find and protect those who we love- is perhaps single-handedly what drives the novel. “Her Wicked Roots,” is equally heavy on the sapphic romance, although that’s a dynamic best discovered entirely by you. Pell explores how love is able to both nourish and strangle, sustain and suffocate, and gives us a little lust along the way.
Pell’s writing is rich and yet easy to consume, the atmosphere she creates a lush but stifling and cloying one, a little like a greenhouse. The novel’s most intriguing dynamic (he writes as a man hoping to get this right, or at the very least, not catastrophically wrong) is the total rejection, often hatred, of men. Considering the stories each of the women there have to tell, the archive of pain inflicted by men, that exclusion is valid. Pell however does complicate this by acknowledging throughout, the existence of good men, from Cordi’s carriage driver in Chapter One, to Mr. Starling who houses and feeds her older brother, to Edward himself. It’s food for thought certainly. When you add the feverish, suffocating love we mentioned earlier, the bizarre cult-like manner in which the house is run, and the bizarre precautions taken and illness spread, Edenfield is certainly more than a little creepy. Whilst it seems Pell only really starts to build steam 30% in, and I did pre-empt a couple of the plot twists, from the moment Cordi crosses the threshold into Edenfield, I found my brow furrowed and my palms a little sweaty- and things just get wronger by the page. There’s a quiet dread that Tanya Pell has clearly mastered.
“Rappaccini’s Daughter,” meets Silvia Moreno-Garcia in this claustrophobic, botanical beast of a book that is indeed as exquisite on the inside as its cover suggests. Thorny, horny, and full of tension (multiple kinds), I was pretty excited about Tanya Pell anyway, but am now truly on the edge of my seat. Whether it be a b-movie bug story, or indeed a queer eco-gothic novel, Pell can write, and can do so with panache- I for one am eager to see what she comes up with next.
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