YOU LET ME IN

RELEASED 5 MARCH 288 pages | Hardback/ebook/ audiobook

Author Camilla Bruce

Publisher Bantam Press

How transparent do you like your metaphors? This sort-of-fantasy novel begins with a challenge: Cassandra Tipp, a famous and controversial author, has gone missing, leaving behind a hefty manuscript for her niece and nephew to plough through. In it, she promises not only a secret phrase that’ll unlock their inheritance, but also answers to all of their family’s most painful mysteries. The challenge lies in deciding which answer to accept.

In one version of her life story, Cassandra was preyed on by a creepy faerie she dubbed Pepper-Man. This thing fed off her at night, spirited her away to faerie balls, and eventually even inhabited the skin of her unfaithful husband until his gory death. In the other, Cassandra was an abused child who imagined faeries to help her cope with her trauma, and who maybe even killed half of her family.

It wouldn’t be tough to see a horrible reality through the fantasy bits, even if Cassandra herself didn’t acknowledge the other explanations. The writing is evocative, but not always as clever as it thinks it is, and the book makes for grim reading: depressing, rather than spooky.

A last-minute sting in the final pages is goosebumpmaking, but it won’t shake the feeling that you’ve just read an especially bleak misery memoir – albeit an entirely made-up one. Sarah Dobbs