The horror of being young, neurodivergent, and queer: a review of Hazelthorn

Take the haunted mansion setup, add a few of the usual twists, and inject a colossal amount of atmospheric gardening imagery, and the result is an unsettling juxtaposition of beauty and violence.

In Hazelthorn, you follow Evander, a boy confined in the decaying Hazelthorn estate. When he inherits the estate under suspicious circumstances, other potential heirs descend on the mansion. What follows is a horrific spiral of mystery, memory, and monstrous love. The garden is creepy, the characters are dangerous, and the secrets are having trouble staying buried.

Be prepared for some misery. The main characters have not had easy lives, and their trauma is on full display. There's body horror. There's abuse. There's tortured souls. Tenderness and pain are difficult to separate in this story about a boy whose past experiences with affection have always involved torment. Evander is also neurodivergent and queer without the language to fully understand or articulate himself, and his encounters with things like love and relationships are not going to be normative. For him, intimacy, hunger, desire, pain, violence, lies, and fear are all fundamentally entangled, and his story is understandably dark. Issues around disability and queerness are not sanitized or watered down at all. It can be devastating and unflinching. A novel this visceral really shouldn't be so magnetic and mesmerizing, but it is. It's compulsively readable, and there's something sinister in how captivatingly lovely such a dark story can be.

At the book's heart is a reminder that history can't stay buried. It's always alive, and it's breathing. You can try all you want to march forward through time, but the more you ignore the past, the angrier it gets. Eventually past and present will collapse in on each other, and this book is asking what happens if you're not prepared for it. The answer: things get violent. Past and present collide, and it's messy. It's painful. No one escapes unscathed as history continues to leave its mark on the body and on the earth.

All gothic fiction is obviously about the past haunting the present, so Drews isn't doing anything remarkably new here, but it doesn't have to be unique to be good. What this book does an exceptionally effective job of is integrating directly into the atmosphere the violence around what happens when time, in typical gothic fiction fashion, collapses in on itself. Rather than just throw us a bunch of traditional images of gothic rot and decay, the first chapter opens with a sad sickly boy in a crumbling manor that seems like it belongs in either Victorian England or the Antebellum South. It feels like historical fiction, until Evander suddenly mentions WiFi and computers. It's jarring to suddenly discover this story is happening in the twenty-first century, and Evander isn't about to die of consumption or something. As I was reading it, I could feel the way the past and present weren't just woven together; they were also slamming into each other. The friction is tangible, and as the story progresses, the tension only increases.

If any of what I've said sounds interesting, you should first be warned that the prose might be a little purple. For me, it's lush and ornate, and I loved it, but it's not going to land for everyone. Each line kind of reads like it could unironically double as the title of a Fall Out Boy song. Some readers may find it angsty, edgy, melodramatic, and overwrought. Others will think it's lyrical, rhythmic, intriguing, and utterly intoxicating. It reads like the type of Supernatural fanfiction posted on Tumblr circa 2015, which might not sound like a compliment, but it is, because that style pretty accurately captures the horrors of coming of age when you're queer and neurodivergent. If you were on Tumblr in 2015, you know what I'm talking about. The writing is pretty consistent across the author's other work, most obviously Don't Let the Forest In, but here, it's paired with some of Drews's tightest pacing. Evander's thrilling journey made my internal organs feel like they were being rearranged. It wasn't comfortable, but I love any novel that makes me feel something so strongly.