Annoy Me to Death

Wade Newhouse considers Camilla Bruce’s new horror novel “At the Bottom of the Garden.”

By Wade NewhouseApril 6, 2025

• SF

CAMILLA BRUCE’S OFFICIAL author bio tells us that she “grew up in an old forest, next to an Iron Age burial mound.” Nothing more is said about what, exactly, such a dramatic and inherently mystical location might have contributed to her imaginative development and writing career, but I’ll admit that I have mentioned it to more than one person who asked what I was reading during the season of long nights. The implied association of childhood with wild spaces and unknowable death rituals forms a perfectly succinct summary of the thematic imagery at the heart of Bruce’s newest novel, At the Bottom of the Garden.

It is easy to call a contemporary novel “gothic,” and, to be frank, I think the term’s increasing cachet in pop culture has led to its application to almost any book or movie or video game that features anything remotely dark or creepy (not even necessarily both at the same time). Thus, stories about ghosts and vampires are gothic, but so are slashers and zombies these days, and so are shadowy urban police procedurals, and so are sci-fi mysteries about rogue AI, and so on. At the Bottom of the Garden, however, is a gothic novel in the old-school mode, a story of powerful psyches contending with the ever-present threat of the supernatural knocking around in the shadows and pushing the boundaries of sanity. Combining traditional set pieces (gardens and forests and bedrooms and other secluded removes from society) with a wryly contemporary narrative voice, Camilla Bruce has crafted a fast-moving modern fairy tale that recalls variously the Brontës, Shirley Jackson, V. C. Andrews, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Lemony Snicket.

Young orphaned girls in distress? Check. A monstrous foster parent bent on abusing the girls for profit? Check. A creepy mansion decorated with taxidermied animals? Check. Violent ghosts, still bearing the wounds of their bloody murders, who break mirrors and knock food out of the mouths of the guilty woman who killed them? Check, check, and check.

The country in which At the Bottom of the Garden takes place is unnamed. Sisters Violet, a nine-year-old, and Lily, 14, find themselves alone in the world when their parents die on a snowy hiking trip. Their aunt, Clara, agrees to adopt them—not out of any goodness in her heart (she has none) but in the hopes of pillaging their parents’ jewelry and helping herself to the girls’ inheritance. The first-person narrative moves back and forth between these three characters, with Violet and Lily and Clara offering distinctly different perspectives on the mysterious events that unfold once the girls move into their aunt’s large and extremely haunted house.

Both Violet and Lily, it turns out, have developed strange paranormal powers in the traumatic time since their parents’ deaths. Violet can interpret people’s emotions in halos of color that swarm around them when they speak to her, while Lily can, at first, see dead people trapped at the site of their death, and later, drawing on some dark, otherworldly intuition, can free the dead from this morbid attachment either to escape into the light or to haunt the world of the living as vengeful poltergeists. When Lily begins to see dead people in Aunt Clara’s house, and when the sisters realize that the ghosts are victims of long-ago secret crimes, the stage is set for a confrontation in which Aunt Clara and the young sisters maneuver to outwit one another with whatever power they have handy. At stake are different visions of freedom: Clara, of course, wants her criminal past to stay hidden from the world and desires to escape the torments of the ghosts whom Violet has freed to haunt her, while Lily and Violet want to escape their aunt’s clutches and obsessive manipulations.

At the Bottom of the Garden, as I suggested, is a gothic novel in the most traditional sense of the genre, but it departs from the classic formula in a significant way: by staging its baroque conflict entirely between women. The magnificently villainous Aunt Clara has secrets to hide, obsessions to indulge, threats to exhort—but she is no Heathcliff or Rochester or Count Olaf. Rather than representing, as masculine gothic villains often do, a threat to domestic virtues coded as feminine by opposing them, Clarabelle Woods is fearsome partly because she embodies a social and moral extremism that young Lily and Violet might someday become simply by growing up. The world of Crescent Hill house, with its young girls and scheming middle-aged aunt and sympathetic housekeeper initially trying to stay out of one another’s way and then forced to accommodate one another’s uncomfortable secrets, is a space in which women confront one another and struggle for dominance.

As tragic as their plight is, and despite the fascinating contact with the supernatural with which they must learn to contend, sisters Lily and Violet are practically swept aside in this novel by the sheer force of Clara’s fascinating narrative presence. She admits her lack of a moral center at the beginning of the novel, showing nothing but scorn for her dead brother and his wife and readily admitting that taking on the care of orphaned children is merely a means to a selfish end. “All I needed to make the dream of my legacy come true was a sizable influx of cash,” she explains on the novel’s first page, and two pages later, she puts her plan in motion: “It wasn’t that I hadn’t coveted my brother’s ample assets before—far from it. I had just not envisioned coming by them in quite such a roundabout way.” Once fate has thrust the bewildered Lily and Violet into her care—but obviously without her caring for them even remotely—Clara dominates the story, sneering and nonchalantly rattling off the details of her machinations, insidious calculations, bitter recriminations, and bloody criminal past to the reader, who might as well be her secret pen pal.

It’s not that Lily and Violet are not interesting in themselves, of course. Their peril puts them in a long line of sympathetic gothic heroines who must develop their own inner strengths to contend with the cruelty of a hostile world. As the story develops and Clara finds new ways to tighten her grip upon them, the girls’ new magical powers come more sharply into focus and complement one another more precisely, and the sisters grow closer to one another and more problematic for Clara to control. The ghosts that Violet has inadvertently set free refuse to be exorcised; they make Clara’s life a nonstop circus of violent attacks, throaty condemnations from beyond the grave, and near-starvation as they forcefully knock food from her mouth every time she tries to eat. Ever the entrepreneur, Clara seizes upon Violet’s ability to channel the dead and drags her around the countryside as a reluctant medium, looking for sad widows who might pay for a makeshift séance. These episodes leave Violet increasingly sick and feverish, and Lily learns that she has the ability to heal her sister by ingesting the strange ectoplasmic residue that Violet’s body generates during these episodes. As each chapter rotates from one character’s perspective to the next, Lily and Violet come to understand more about how the afterlife works and how their own intuitions and compassions are part of a universal cycle involving grief, nature, and family.

In the end, though, such emotional discoveries—which are just as central to the gothic tradition as the angry ghosts and hubris of a villain—are less satisfying than listening to Clara fantasize about her dream of owning a jewelry company or hooking up with a casual lover and hoping against hope that the tryst won’t be interrupted by visits from a corpse (spoiler: it will be). The greatest pleasures of the book come not from what Clara or Violet or Lily or the restless haunts do but from what Clara Woods says about them. Her voice, by turns exasperated, cunning, ominous, and ultimately just done with the whole tension between her desire for wealth and the pressure of the supernatural, ties together the wide spectrum of sinister set pieces and creepy genre conventions and makes it all manageable for us. She is both terrifyingly, practically evil and relatable, plowing through one distressing and grotesque confrontation after another with a grim, self-deprecating humor that I personally hope I can summon if I ever get haunted. “What are you going to do?” she asks the ghost of her murdered husband, “Annoy me to death?”

For better or worse, no one in At the Bottom of the Garden gets annoyed to death, and the exciting, ultimately emotional final act of this energetic and satisfying novel will scratch the itch of readers looking for an icy read that’s a little bit creepy, a little bit funny, and just predictable enough to be comforting—if you like your comfort served with axe murders, poison, and ectoplasmic tadpoles.