“Why is that?” I asked in a voice hoarse from lecturing. “Do you think the wicked witches and cruel stepmothers in your storybooks just appeared, like that?” I snapped my fingers. “Do you think they were hatched from witches’ eggs, or sprung from the devil’s brow fully formed? Even women like me, at odds with the world, have a past. We were all girls once – clay to be molded – but not all of us were allowed to grow and flourish as we should.”

I have yet to read a Camilla Bruce novel that isn’t utterly wonderful. At The Bottom Of The Garden (2025) keeps up her incredible streak of five brilliant novels in a row. At The Bottom Of The Garden is a typically Bruce-ian twisted take on fairy tales and the idea of the wicked stepmother. Bruce creates a tense and frightening story of two girls who are forced to live with their murderous aunt and encounter ghosts as they come into their own magical powers. But At The Bottom Of The Garden is also a powerful meditation on death and grief, what it means to lose someone and what it means to not be able to let go. And of course, Bruce continues her noble tradition of creating compelling yet deeply unlikable female characters. At The Bottom Of The Garden is another gothic triumph from one of horror’s modern masters.

Fourteen-year-old Lily and nine-year-old Violet are suddenly orphaned when their parents die trying to climb K2. Their Aunt Clara takes them in, not out of the goodness of her heart, but because the girls stand to inherit a sizeable fortune when they come of age, and come with a handsome stipend. The money will go some way towards helping Clara realise her lifelong dream of launching a line of diamond jewellery. What she hasn’t bargained on is that Lily and Violet have inherited strange powers from their mother. Violet can see the dead, as well as communicate with them, which leads to her uncovering Clara’s biggest secrets – Clara has murdered her husband and her the old woman who left her the house. When Violet awakens the wronged ghosts in Clara’s house, she unwittingly starts a power struggle, as her and her sister’s will to survive is pitted against Clara’s murderous ambition.

At The Bottom Of The Garden plays with gothic and fairy tale tropes in subversive and imaginative ways. At its heart is the idea of the wicked stepmother, brilliantly explored through the character of Clara. What makes Clara such a great character is that she has just enough of a sympathetic backstory that we can understand where she’s coming from, but the novel never makes the mistake of trying to excuse her utterly horrendous behaviour. Her mother essentially wrote her out of her life and her will after marrying the rich man who got her out of poverty and provided her with her son, the man who would become Lily and Violet’s daughter. Her husband cheats on her with a younger woman and threatens to leave taking everything she worked so hard to build. So we can feel for her difficult up binging and the tension she feels with her family and her husband, and admire the way that she embraces the wicked stepmother archetype as part of her programme to reclaim some kind of agency for herself in a world largely set against her. However we also see immediately that she is vain, selfish and self-obsessed, to the extent that she has zero moral qualms murdering her husband and his lover out of a fit of jealousy, or blackmailing the old woman she’s looking after as a nurse to force her into leaving her house to her. She equally has zero qualms adopting her orphaned nieces in the hopes of extracting their money to fund her diamond line, at the expense of their well-being. The novel is told in sections split equally between Clara, Lily and Violet, and as we come to care for Lily and Violet we fear for them because we can see just how monstrous Clara really is. Her jaundiced perspective is hugely entertaining, whilst never letting us forget that she’s a petty, self-centred monster. 

If Clara’s sheer strength of personality threatens to overwhelm the book, Lily and Violet prove more than capable of holding their own. Lily is the strong, protective older sister desperate to care for Violet, the only family she has left, in their parents’ absence. She finds herself with the power to sense others’ emotions and to heal the living. Violet is the innocent but surprisingly level-headed younger sister who has the power to speak to the dead and summon them. Together they provide the moral compass that Clara lacks, and a likability to balance out her villainousness without tipping over into sanctimoniousness [Ed: it’s ok red squiggly lines, I know, there there]. Their loss of their parents provides the emotional core of the book, with Bruce exploring with depth and nuance the long and difficult process of grieving for someone taken away from you unexpectedly. Their interactions with the ghosts allow Bruce to explore other forms of loss as well, from the ghosts of Clara’s victims who are mourning the life they had stolen to them, to the various people that Clara tries to hire Violet out to as a medium, each of whom are dealing with their own individual and personal forms of loss. This gives the book an emotional heft that one might not necessarily expect from the sheer amount of fun Bruce is clearly having with the set up. 

At The Bottom Of The Garden delivers everything I’ve come to expect from Bruce’s writing. The prose is beautiful, its characters are brilliant, and it smartly uses fairy tale and gothic tropes to explore the lives of unusual women. And for a novel that’s so much about grief and loss, it might just be her most fun story yet. Long may her reign as the Queen of literary feminist horror continue. 

At The Bottom Of The Garden is available now – you can order your copy HERE