This article contains affiliate links to Amazon. Thank you for supporting The Game of Nerds.

C.G. Drews, the author that you are for having written such a painfully beautiful masterpiece.

From the author of Don’t Let the Forest In and The Boy Who Steals Houses comes a hauntingly beautiful botanical horror novel that is both deeply unsettling and surprisingly tender.

Hazelthorn tells the story of Evander, a seventeen year old boy who has been living his life confined to a single room for the past seven years. This is for his own good, you see, because seven years ago his best friend, Laurie, tried to kill him with a shovel and bury him alive in the gardens of Hazelthorn. Evander does not remember anything before the accident. All he knows are the four walls of his room, a mysterious illness that leaves him with gaps in time, and whatever his caretaker, and Laurie’s grandfather, Byron Laurence Lennox-Hall, has told him.

But now Byron is dead, suddenly and mysteriously, and has left Evander his vast wealth and the entire Hazelthorn estate, with its unruly garden and all its bloody secrets. Laurie has every reason to want him dead, again. But he may be Evander’s only ally as the rest of the Lennox-Hall relatives swoop in and try to pry Hazelthorn from his hands by any means necessary.

The perfect mystery, the perfect unreliable narrator

Only a few chapters in, the thing that changes everything occurs, the death of Byron Laurence Lennox-Hall, changing Evander’s life in ways he could never possibly imagine.

Little is known about Evander and his situation within Hazelthorn. Memory-less and secluded from the world after almost being killed, he is the perfect blank slate to be entering the story with. All we know is what Byron has told him. Of what came before. Of who he was. Of how he is forbidden from seeing Laurie, because somehow they went from the best of friends to hateful enemies in a single, sunny day in the gardens of Hazelthorn.

As Byron’s secrets begin to unravel, so do Evander’s, creating the perfect mystery within a mystery: the murder of Byron and the events of Evander’s near-death experience seven years ago. Evander’s memories are so tangled up in the walls of Hazelthorn that they cannot help but be unraveled along with Byron’s secrets as Evander seeks to solve the mystery of his death.

There are so many questions begging to be answered.

Who killed Byron Laurence Lennox-Hall?

What is wrong with the garden?

Why did Laurie try to kill Evander?

Who was Evander before the accident?

Is Evander even sick?

Why does nobody want Evander to go into the garden?

“Maybe they’ve always done what they wanted with him, right here, in Hazelthorn. Because nobody tells wealthy, vicious people what to do.”

Evander is the perfect unreliable narrator to unravel these secrets. Because Evander himself has no idea what is going on outside the walls of his bedroom, C.G. Drews gets away with giving you everything you need to know right from the very beginning. It’s all right under your nose, hiding in the things Laurie says, in the way the Lennox-Halls treat Evander. Even veiled under the hauntingly gorgeous descriptions of the way Evander views himself and his own ruined body. But you don’t understand, because Evander doesn’t understand.

In my notes, I wrote down the exact quote that revealed everything, the biggest secret being kept from Evander.

“‘I want Hazelthorn. I’ve always wanted Hazelthorn.’”

As Laurie says this, he is staring directly at Evander. Not Dawes, who he is speaking to, but Evander. Of course, it is not hard to realize that Laurie is not talking about the house, but that is just the mere surface of what is yet to come.

What the **** is wrong with the garden?

“‘Do not go into the gardens. Swear to me, Evander.'”

Although not much is clear, Byron Laurence Lennox-Hall’s last words leave us with a single, definite conclusion: something dangerous lurks in the gardens of Hazelthorn. And perhaps it is more than just a monster.

The pages of Hazelthorn are brimming with beautifully ominous language of vines overgrowing the confines of the garden, choking the walls of the estate. Overcoming it. Breaking through the boundaries of nature and seeping inside to places it does not belong. The garden feels alive and ever-changing. It knows no bounds, infiltrating Hazelthorn in every way possible. Evander feels the presence of the garden everywhere, even within himself. A mouthful of flowers, thorns wrapping around his insides. Roots threading their way through his body, from the tips of his fingers to the palms of his feet.

The desire to sink his teeth into flesh and revel in the taste of blood upon his tongue.

Drews’s words create the most beautiful imagery of the dark power of the garden invading the estate and those who live within it. But, what if it’s not just haunting imagery? What if it’s not just a metaphor of Evander’s illness and trauma or the relationship between the Lennox-Halls and the power within the garden?

What if there is more truth to what Drews is telling us than we might think?

“They’re both getting what they always wanted, he and the garden.

Escape, revenge, freedom, veneration. Nothing can cage them back up; all the walls are down.”

This is a horror book, you know. Anything could be possible.

The obsession

Enemies to lovers is great and all, but it will never compare to two boys so obsessed with each other that each and every one of their thoughts is consumed by the other, so that the line between love and hate blurs, warping it into a hateful yearning that threatens to consume them whole. Wretched, feral boys who are viscerally obsessed with each other is peak literature and you cannot change my mind.

“His hate for Laurie is unmanageable, wild and bitter as wormwood on his tongue, and he should have lost all interest in him by now. He shouldn’t watch for him through his window. Or crave snippets of his voice. Or think about his cornflower-blue eyes and the beautiful shape of his wretched mouth.”

It is complicated, what they are to each other. From what Evander has been told, he has every reason to hate Laurie. And he does. He hates Laurie. And Laurie must hate him too. They aren’t pretty or soft in the ways they ache for each other. Their first kiss is bloody and monstrous and hateful, cruel in ways a kiss shouldn’t be. But this is who they are. They’ve seen all the ways in which they can be cruel, have even used that cruelty as a weapon against the other, and they still love each other. As if they were made for each other, their love something grown in the haunting, bloody soil of the gardens of Hazelthorn among all the other secrets threatening to destroy them.

“‘No matter what happens,’ Laurie whispers, blood freckling his round cheeks, ‘remember your name is Evander and you love me best.’

He is foolish to use love, as if a word like that can hold true when someone else’s blood is in his mouth.”

Evander and Laurie, you were perfect, and I will be thinking about all the gruesome ways you covet and crave each other until the end of time.

My Recommendation

Hazelthorn was, without a doubt, a 5-star read for me. C.G. Drews has found a way to make body horror beautiful, to make hateful obsession tender, and a book that might seem like a murder mystery in cursed garden into a gruesomely raw love story between two boys fighting back against the trauma and abuse they have endured their entire lives.

This is one of those books that I cannot wait to go back and read a second time knowing what I now know, and letting all the things Laurie says to Evander completely ruin me.

Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group for a copy of an eARC in exchange for an honest review. Hazelthorn by C.G. Drews comes out October 28th, 2025.