No one cares when Lila Carson’s ten-year-old brother Beau disappears. He can’t speak. He throws tantrums. He’s a useless Carson, one of those kids in a broken-shuttered house that lost its glory when his father died. When the sheriff and his good ol’ boy deputies show up to investigate, they eye up Lila and call her twin brother, Quentin, names. A closeted bisexual girl in the South, she’s terrified.
Lower Congaree recites it like an eleventh commandment: Don’t go in that swamp. But as the long night drags on, it’s clear Beau disappeared behind those ancient trees. The sheriff’s deputies won’t risk going back there.
Dark bleatings, my…bloody(?) tribe! Where to even start? Well, this isn’t my first Elizabeth Broadbent book, but it is my favourite so far, and the story that convinced me she’s absolutely brilliant. I think this novella is superb.
A woman meets Lila in a bar. She’s told that Lila is always sad, and she decides to take her home and offer some comfort. In no time at all, their intimacy level is high, and the strange and sad Lila opens up about her background. We spend most of the story from here in Lila’s past, and it was absolutely captivating.
When Lila was 18, her 10 year old brother, Beau, went missing. Somehow, she just knew that he’d wandered into the local swamp – a place so feared by the locals that even the police who are tasked with finding the kid won’t venture in there. This, among many other things, is a constant source of contention for Lila, who loves her little brother and can’t understand why a group of grown men are too scared to properly look for him.
She’s a bisexual young woman in the American south, which is rife with homophobia and misogyny. Her relationships with her two older brothers are extremely difficult for different reasons, and she constantly finds herself on the receiving end of not just prejudice but thinly veiled sexual threats. And then, of course, there’s that swamp. It’s not normal.
I was completely engrossed in this book from the first page to the last. Broadbent’s ability to weave external and internal conflict is seamless and masterful, not to mention how expertly she handles subtext and metaphor. This story is deep without being pretentious, scary for numerous reasons but without pushing the supernatural too far – it’s really a perfect balance of real world horror and otherworldly strangeness. I got shades of Jeff Vandermeer for parts of this.
Perhaps my favourite thing about Broadbent’s writing is the way she captures the particular struggles and anxieties of Lila. There are some things about her life and the things that cause her fear that are very specific to her situation, but also extremely relatable for a lot of us, and I think the way her character was handled was fantastic.
I’d recommend this to horror fans that are particularly interested in character. If you’d like to check out the book or the author, I’ve popped some links below for you:
Bleeeeat!
Happy Goat Horror 
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