What lengths would a woman go to if she were desperate to give birth? Clare Beams follows that question to its darkest ends in this dreamlike chiller, which carries shivery echoes of everything from Rosemary’s Baby to Pet Sematary.
In 1948, protagonist Irene Willard arrives at an archetypal gothic country house, where fertility doctors trial experimental procedures on women who’ve had multiple miscarriages. The mysterious country building comes with a mysterious country garden, and it’s to this darkly enchanted terrain that Irene and the other patients turn when the doctors’ schemes falter. Without giving too much away, it seems that the landscape responds to the women’s intense desire for gestation and birth by enabling the reanimation and resurrection of Mother Nature’s various creatures.
It’s a bold thematic brew, splicing together The Secret Garden, Bambi, Doctor Faustus and the zombie apocalypse. Beams skilfully conveys the intensity of Irene’s fear and longing, her dread of childbirth and miscarriage, motherhood and being childless. She writes vividly about the reality of miscarriage: “the wave, the streak, the clot, the pool, the groan, the clench, the seep, the first slight cramp, each moment a terrible balance of hoping and dreading, listening and trying not to listen, feeling and trying not to feel”.
Overall, however, the prose is slow-going, its incantatory rhythm hard to grasp. After one occult act, Irene isn’t sure “what anything they would or wouldn’t find would tell them… the blood would be gone or not gone, but the creature their act had served or not served was hidden inside Margaret either way, buried in her flesh, saved or not saved by what they’d done, transformed or not transformed, in any case inaccessible”.
Some readers may savour The Garden in small doses, but many others will find it soporific. There’s a great novella buried here, fighting to get out.
• The Garden by Clare Beams is published by Atlantic (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
