C.G. Drews returns to the literary landscape with Hazelthorn, a novel that doesn’t so much ease you into its nightmare as it does shove you face-first into poisoned soil. Following her New York Times bestseller Don’t Let the Forest In, Drews proves once again that she understands something essential about horror: the most terrifying monsters are the ones we create when we deny someone their humanity.
Seventeen-year-old Evander has lived his entire remembered life in one room of the sprawling Hazelthorn Estate, a prisoner disguised as a ward. His guardian, the austere billionaire Byron Lennox-Hall, has given him three unbreakable rules: never leave the estate, never enter the gardens, and most critically, never be alone with Byron’s grandson Laurie—the boy who tried to kill him seven years ago. When Byron dies under suspicious circumstances and Evander inherits everything, those carefully constructed walls begin to crumble, and with them, the lies that have kept him caged.
The Architecture of Obsession
What makes Hazelthorn compelling isn’t just its gothic trappings or botanical body horror, though both are rendered with visceral precision. It’s the way Drews excavates the psychology of a boy who has been systematically unmade and reassembled into something more palatable, more controlled. Evander pinches himself to feel alive, counts his breaths, follows rules he’s internalized so deeply they’ve become part of his skeleton. He’s been taught to suspect his own mind, to question his memories, to accept that his episodes of “madness” require medication and isolation.
The relationship between Evander and Laurie crackles with a tension that feels genuinely dangerous. This isn’t a romance built on misunderstandings or slow-burn pining—it’s an obsession, raw and tooth-marked. Evander can’t stop thinking about Laurie even as he investigates whether Laurie murdered their shared guardian. Laurie circles Evander with the careful attention of someone handling something precious and volatile. Their dynamic reads less like enemies-to-lovers and more like two people recognizing the same wound in each other, the same rage at being forced into shapes that don’t fit.
Where the Thorns Catch
The novel’s greatest strength lies in its commitment to disorientation. Drews writes Evander’s fractured consciousness with such claustrophobic intensity that readers experience his confusion firsthand. When plants begin growing in impossible ways, when Evander finds roots sprouting from his own feet, when the butler who should be dead comes lurching back with a cavity where his organs should be—we’re never quite sure what’s real and what’s Evander’s “illness” manifesting.
However, this same strength occasionally becomes a stumbling block. The middle section, where Evander plays amateur detective investigating Byron’s death, occasionally loses momentum as it cycles through suspects and red herrings. While the mystery framework provides structure, it sometimes feels at odds with the book’s more surreal, dreamlike qualities. The investigation scenes, with their notecards and logical deduction, jar against sequences where reality itself seems negotiable.
The pacing also suffers from an overabundance of revelations in the final third. When the truth about Evander’s identity finally emerges—that he is not a boy at all but something the garden created, something Byron dug up and tried to reshape into human form—it arrives alongside revelations about Laurie’s role, the family’s blood-for-rubies legacy, and the nature of the garden itself. It’s a lot to process simultaneously, and some emotional beats don’t get the breathing room they deserve.
The Language of Decay
Drews writes with a prose style that shifts between Gothic lushness and clipped, frantic fragments. Her descriptions of the garden are particularly evocative: ivy with leaves like steel razors, flowers that deflate when exposed to light, roses so overgrown they pierce their own petals. The body horror is rendered with unflinching specificity—watching Evander pull roots from his feet or discover bark where his hand should be creates genuine visceral discomfort.
The novel also succeeds in its quieter moments. Evander lying on his floor, listening to a voice reading stories through his locked door. Laurie’s carefully controlled movements when his surgically damaged wrist causes him pain. The way the garden responds to Evander’s emotions, blooming violent and beautiful when he feels most fractured. These scenes reveal the emotional truth beneath the horror: this is a story about what happens to people—to anyone who doesn’t fit the mold—when they’re told their authentic self is wrong, is dangerous, is something that needs to be fixed.
Autistic Rage and Bodily Autonomy
In her author’s note, Drews explicitly frames Hazelthorn as a story of “queer and autistic rage and of being pushed over the edge.” This context transforms the garden from simple monster into metaphor. Evander has been medicated into compliance, had his very identity stolen and replaced with a more acceptable version, been locked away when he couldn’t perform normalcy correctly. The garden’s violence becomes a response to violation, its hunger a manifestation of everything denied.
The novel doesn’t shy away from the ugliness of this rage. When Evander transforms fully into Hazelthorn—when he stops fighting what he is—he kills. The garden tears through the mansion, feeds on those who tried to harvest it, refuses to be contained anymore. It’s uncomfortable, as it should be. The book asks us to sit with the knowledge that the monster was created by those who insisted on cutting away anything they found inconvenient or profitable.
Gothic Traditions Reimagined
Hazelthorn sits comfortably alongside classic Gothic literature while subverting its tropes. The isolated mansion, the family with dark secrets, the unreliable narrator—all present and accounted for. But where Gothic novels often position the house as antagonist, Hazelthorn reveals that the estate itself is just as much a victim as Evander. The Lennox-Hall family bled the garden for generations, harvesting rubies from blood-soaked soil, using both Evander and the land as resources to be exploited.
The novel also engages with contemporary concerns about medical abuse and the pathologization of difference. Byron’s treatments of Evander—the medications that dulled him, the surgeries that literally harvested pieces of him, the isolation presented as care—echo real-world experiences of autistic people subjected to behavioral therapies designed to make them more palatable to neurotypical society.
Technical Considerations
The book’s structure sometimes works against its strengths. The mystery framework necessitates a certain linear progression, but the story’s power comes from its surreal, cyclical nature—Evander waking, forgetting, being trapped in the same patterns. The most effective sections are those that embrace confusion rather than trying to explain it away.
Additionally, some supporting characters remain underdeveloped. The extended Lennox-Hall family—Oleander, Azalea, Bane—serve primarily as obstacles rather than fully realized antagonists. Their motivations rarely extend beyond greed for the family fortune. This creates a somewhat two-dimensional villain problem, though the book’s real antagonist has always been the system that created them, not the individuals themselves.
The romance elements may not satisfy readers looking for a traditional love story. Evander and Laurie’s relationship is complicated by the fact that Laurie did participate in the sacrifice attempt, even if his motivations were more complex than initially presented. Their final reconciliation asks readers to accept that love can exist alongside harm, that healing doesn’t require forgetting what was done. It’s a bold choice that won’t work for everyone.
The Verdict: Beauty in the Brambles
Hazelthorn is not a comfortable read, nor is it meant to be. It’s prickly, occasionally unwieldy, and refuses easy categorization. But it’s also genuinely affecting in its portrayal of someone reclaiming an identity that others tried to bury. The ending—with Evander choosing to remain behind the garden walls with Laurie, accepting what he is rather than what he was forced to be—offers a strange kind of hope. Not redemption or recovery in any traditional sense, but acceptance. The garden opens for Laurie alone, and Evander finally stops apologizing for having thorns.
Fans of Andrew Joseph White’s Hell Followed With Us and Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer will find familiar themes of body horror as metaphor and environments that reflect inner trauma. Readers who appreciated Drews’ previous work will recognize her commitment to writing characters whose minds work in beautifully strange ways.
Is Hazelthorn a perfect novel? No. Its pacing stutters, its mystery elements occasionally feel obligatory, and it demands readers accept a relationship that many will find troubling. But it’s also fearless in ways that matter. It says clearly that the cage is never for your own good, that the medication is about making you easier to manage, that the people who insist on fixing you are often the ones who are broken.
In the garden behind the red door, among the Devil’s Tongues and Bloodberries and Heart Rot vines, something wild grows. Drews argues convincingly that maybe wildness isn’t something that needs to be tamed. Maybe the monster was right to bite back. And maybe, just maybe, there’s something beautiful about a boy who’s finally allowed to have teeth.
Similar Reads for Gothic Horror Enthusiasts
If you enjoyed Hazelthorn, consider these books:
Don’t Let the Forest In by C.G. Drews – The author’s previous work explores similar themes of houses with appetites and the horror of being misunderstood
Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White – Body horror meets religious trauma in this story of a trans boy becoming a monster
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer – The Southern Reach trilogy’s exploration of landscapes that transform those who enter them
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson – Gothic isolation and family secrets with an unreliable narrator
The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling – Claustrophobic horror about what we become when pushed to extremes
The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling – Gothic medical horror in a house that won’t let go
A Dowry of Blood by S.T. Gibson – Gothic romance examining power dynamics and bodily autonomy
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia – A decaying house and the family that feeds off those within it
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher – A retelling of “The Fall of the House of Usher” with fungal body horror
Final Thoughts
C.G. Drews has crafted something genuinely unsettling with Hazelthorn—a novel that understands horror isn’t just about what lurks in the dark, but about being denied the right to exist as you are. It’s messy, occasionally overgrown with its own ambitions, and absolutely unforgettable. Like the garden at its heart, it demands to be experienced on its own terms. Some will find it too thorny to embrace. Others will recognize themselves in its brambles and feel, perhaps for the first time, that someone understands the rage of being pruned into an acceptable shape.
The garden always knows its own. And sometimes, knowing you’re the monster is the first step toward being free.