A review by horrorbutch
Blood Cypress by Elizabeth Broadbent

adventurous dark emotional fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

 Disclaimer: I received an e-ARC from netgalley. 

This novella explores a southern family where everything is seemingly wrong. The father is dead, the mother is lazy, the daugher’s a lesbian, one son has long hair and the youngest son is just plain wrong and doesn’t talk. Or so the chatter in the town goes. Nobody actually cares about the precarious finances of a family raised by a grieving mother and a son that needs constant caring, not when the appearances are just so wrong (after all, a woman who can’t keep her house in order doesn’t really deserve any pity! And one that lets her kids run around like that? Even less so.) And when the youngest son goes missing one day while everybody else is at work and the brother tasked with watching over his little brother takes his eyes off him to do his homework everything begins to unravel and prejudices that were just boiling under the surface for far too long start boiling over. 

The story is interrupted with short chapters exploring that Lila, the daughter, has grown up to actually sleep with women and left that small southern town as she tells a woman she spent the night with about what happened during that search for her little brother. It is very interesting and I liked that the listening character could function as an audience stand in, asking a few of the questions I was asking myself. I really enjoyed the descriptions of the swamp in the end and I liked how the stories tied the two separate timelines together in the end. 

All in all, if you like gothic horror with queer aspects, a really interesting exploration of swamps and a view at the small town prejudices against poor, autistic and queer people, this was a fun novella and I really enjoyed reading it. 

TW: ableism, death, death by fire, homophobia, attempted incestuous assault, talk of sexual assault, sexual harassment