Hazelthorn, the eponymous estate of C. G. Drews’s latest novel, is a vine-bound gothic pile. It features in a novel that tackles class and the consequences of wealth accumulation. But, when you dig deep enough, loneliness and queer yearning are at the roots of both.

The novel’s protagonist, Evander, has been deceived into believing he has been sick for seven years, and regurgitates the narrative his “caretaker”—Byron—has given him: scion of the estate Laurie Lennox-Hall tried to dissect him with a shovel, and because of it, Evander is a homebody constantly under the scalpel and receiving medicine. Despite his “permanent injury,” Evander longs for Laurie’s “cornflower blue eyes and the beautiful shape of his wretched mouth,” a key tension asserted throughout the story (p. 10).

But in fact, Laurie—“this family’s bad apple, the academically defective and offensively queer Lennox-Hall who runs their mouth”—once fed the Hazelthorn garden his blood and wished for a friend, and Evander appeared. This warped creation metaphor isn’t lost on Drews: through the breath of life (in this case, blood), a man springs from the dirt. In fact, near the end of the novel, this beautiful line addresses the relationship of Laurie with Evander: “God was stronger than me when he made Adam and didn’t fall in love with him” (p. 345). Another similarity with God: Laurie hides the truth from Evander, and the only way for Evander to learn he’s been deceived is for Byron Lennox-Hall to die.

When Byron Lennox-Hall suffers a poison-induced death-seizure, then, Evander will learn the truth. The path to these revelations begins when a tall woman enters Evander’s room. She has gaudy taste: leopard-print heels, red pants, and “overstated and lavish” jewelry—including ruby bracelets and earrings. But most interesting are her “white saber teeth” (p. 75). Oleander Lennox-Hall’s condescending attitude matches her fashion sense. When she asks a non-verbal Evander if he speaks, she says each word slowly, like he’s a simpleton. When he doesn’t answer, she grabs his jaw and inspects him. She says the prettiness of his eyes is “wasted on a boy,” calls his hair a “ghastly mop,” and, very obviously, thinks she has inherited all the money and property left to Evander in Byron’s will (p. 77). This introduction characterizes Oleander and the remaining Lennox-Halls perfectly—conniving, judgmental, and greedy. It mirrors the relationship the Lennox-Halls have with the garden as well, feeding it corpses for blood rubies. They all see Byron’s death as an opportunity to enrich themselves—and Evander as an obstacle.

The Lennox-Halls, save for Laurie, view all people as resources to further enrich themselves. In one scene, Evander follows Oleander’s son, Bane, and her assistant, Jessica, into the garden. As you might have guessed, Bane murders Jessica and buries her to make rubies (p. 189). In another, Laurie’s aunt Azalea tries to seduce Evander in order to gain access to the resources left to him in Byron’s will (p. 221). Eventually, we find out that Byron himself has been fed by the other Lennox-Halls to the very garden he abused, to make more rubies. Even the lawyer and executor of the will is greedy, lying about the will to misdirect the whole family and then cutting a deal with them to take a “clipping” of the garden to start his own Hazelthorn elsewhere. Of course, this clipping is a part of Evander.

In contrast, Laurie thinks the garden is right to try and kill the Lennox-Halls: “The garden fucking hates Lennox-Halls, and why shouldn’t it? … The garden wasn’t like that until they started feeding it blood. They made it a monster. So I guess it gets revenge when it can … Good for it, quite frankly” (p. 255). Evander’s existence is Laurie’s fault: He fed the garden his own blood to get a friend, rather than feeding it a victim for riches. In fact, Laurie is so different from the other Lennox-Halls that his family decides to kill him (p. 316).

The wedge Drews drives between Laurie and his relatives, of course, is meant to endear him to us. And it works, in the sense that Laurie’s snarky behavior is preferable to that of unrepentant murderers. Laurie’s beauty (described in sometimes derisive detail, and ad nauseam, by Evander in the novel) is seemingly “balanced” by his wrist disability, inflicted by Byron. One scene features Evander sneaking into Laurie’s room and spying on him as he tends to his arm: “This is a moment so raw and skeletal it feels wrong to see” (p. 112). “He would core him like a pear and throw away the soft, rotted skin until he saw him as he really is: horrible and beautiful and real” (p. 114). This is our first taste of Laurie beneath his moody teenage mask, and it’s braided with Evander’s conflicting desire and detestation for him. (This is further fueled, of course, by Evander’s years of loneliness.)

Evander vicariously derives romantic experiences from “mildewy books” where “the lord marries a lady without much variation”; but he desires variation, frequently fantasizing about kissing boys, Laurie usually being the boy in question (p. 153). His reclusiveness feeds his Laurie obsession, the pages are absolutely bursting with sensual thoughts of Laurie, but one directly relates to Evander’s hermitism. “Not that Evander would kiss someone like that. That would be akin to swallowing poison and relishing the taste. He can picture himself kissing girls, and he likes that idea, so his addiction to Laurie must be born of starvation, of deprivation, of memories from a ruined childhood friendship that he can’t quite get over” (p. 65).

Evander’s yearning seems unrequited through most of the novel, but near the end we discover Laurie’s snark is a shield to hide his affections for Evander. Laurie is “shitty” towards him because he needs Evander to hate him, but he eventually admits: “I’d split my bones, I’d open my throat, I’d do anything to be near you and have even one second with my mouth against yours” (p. 283). Once they’ve established mutual desire, these boys are ready to burn the world down for each other. In Evander’s case, it’s closer to a bloodbath.

Evander poisons the Lennox-Halls at a wake and the garden comes to life, murdering many of them, including the lawyer. After this scarlet ceremony, Laurie and Evander (now calling himself Hazelthorn) remain in the garden, where all they do is kiss. This romance at the core of the novel is its resolution, in which the “odd” Lennox-Hall remains with the garden because he is less greedy, less murderous, while the others scatter into the wind, never to see their inheritance.

While all of this was enjoyable, ultimately I found the prose to be too submerged in a stream of consciousness style. It leans on the idea of a “good” rich person pursuing better communion with the earth, meshing queerness and wealth critique within the gothic. Ultimately, it neatly combines a critique of the rich themselves with one of the exploitation inherent to gaining massive wealth.