You Let Me In by Camilla Bruce

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received an advanced review copy of this novel due to my being a contemporary English Gothic novelist. The blurb sounded intriguing, and I love the idea of it being a story within a story, meaning we don’t know what or who to believe right from the start. Can you ever really believe what an author tells you? That question has never occurred to me before, but now I think about it, our reality can be very different from the realities of our readers. But enough of that. Back to the story.

You Let Me In is creepy and disturbing right from the start. We begin by learning that the reclusive author, Cassandra Tipp, is surrounded by mistrust following the apparently violent death of her husband many years earlier. We then learn that Cassandra has disappeared and has left instructions with her lawyers that her niece and nephew should visit her home and find out the truth about their strange aunt. I was hooked in right from the start, loving the traditional theme of mystery and suspense. There was a lot of description that put me right there in the story, and I could almost picture the author’s house in the woods near my home.

Then the story turned even darker, and the real fairy tale was revealed. These are faeries of old, living from the land and the people they connect with, taking their lifeblood and forever entwining them in a world that is dark, deadly and where nothing is as it seems. Did Cassandra literally run away with the faeries in the end? I don’t know. All I know is that there were parts of this novel that disturbed me, but I couldn’t stop reading it. I felt like I intruded on a world that I am not meant to be a part of, and it’s a world that I am quite happy to leave well alone. If you like your stories creepy and Gothic, then you will enjoy this!

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