A Gothic Novel of a Different Kind: "The Garden of Bewitchment" by Catherine Cavendish

Well played, Catherine Cavendish, very well played… You had me fooled throughout the bigger part of this book, had me thinking I had figured it out, rolling my eyes at the ostensible Victorian banality of it all... And then you speed up toward the end and come up with that bombshell in the last quarter that I can only applaud. The Garden of Bewitchment is an exquisitely crafted, wonderfully astonishing, plain fantastic book! Forget all you know about cozy Gothic fiction because Cavendish is here to push the boundaries of convention and rewrite it all in letters of dread!

The year is 1893 and we're very much in England. Seeking some calm and privacy after the death of their father, twin sisters Evelyn and Claire Wainwright go rural and move to the moors. They are an odd couple, these sisters - Evelyn always cool, sharp, neat and orderly; her messy, absent-minded, chaotic twin sister Claire the complete opposite in every way. What binds them, though, is their strong companionship as well as their passion for writing gothic fiction - the eerie story of Lady Madolyn and their own haunted universe Calladocia provide them some creative together-time. Not entirely unrelated to their shared interest in writing is their admiration for the literary superstars of the period, the Brontë family (who at the time of this story are all dead already), and Claire's special interest going to the youngest and only male member of the family, Branwell Brontë. She's a proper fangirl.

As convention goes, spooky things start happening after their move into their new home and gradually gain on intensity as the novel progresses. Among these things is the emergence of a board game of an enchanted garden, that, as will later explained, represents a sort of anti-garden-of-Eden, and has the power to absorb humans into a kind of hallucinatory nightmare. The game is somewhat maybe or certainly connected to the mysterious and good looking neighbor Matthew Dixon, who apparently has a secret or two of his own. I apologize for my vagueness, but this is a mystery and I don't want to give away more than is necessary. Anyway, a sort of crush develops between Evelyn and Matthew, who go on long walks along the moors, much to the discontent of Claire, who, on her part, leads a marriage with the ghost of Branwell - just read the dang book, it will make much more sense from the mouth of Cavendish than my puny synopsis here does!

Besides making use of loads of Gothic elements that set the tone for the first half of the novel, Cavendish also toys with all sorts of more hardcore horror fascinations. Here, the haunted place with a history meets the "double freak" chic of twin siblings; romance meets toys coming alive; a handsome but dubious stranger and a damsel in distress meet the Ancient One; a miasmic atmosphere meets a sentient book, demonic cults and foreboding meta stories. It is exactly this use of almost confusingly numerous variety of the horrific and this unusual mashup that makes The Garden of Bewitchment so appealing and interesting.

As I mentioned before, the weirdness is being gradually tuned up and eventually leads to a gloriously freaky finale! Bravo, Catherine Cavendish, I am now a fan of yours forever. But don’t worry, I won’t use your image to partner up in the name of an ancient evil to mess with humanity. I'm all harmless.