Beneath Beauford Grove

by E. Denise Billups

Rating: *****

When Evangeline “Eva” Beauford was sent away at the age of ten by her mother without explanation from the family's olive plantation in Alabama, Beauford Grove, to live with her cousin in Boston, she felt abandoned and confused.

Eighteen years later, Eva is a successful hematologist, studying the vagaries of human blood, and her own is yielding more questions than science can answer. When she receives a mysterious posthumous letter from her sister, Solange, Eva decides to return to Beauford Grove to make sense of Solange’s strange words, her mother’s rejection, and to discover why the groves flourish so abundantly in the poor, Alabama soil…

Beneath Beauford Grove is a beautiful horror, steeped in ancestral blood magic, Southern Gothic, and dark Haitian diabolism. It’s the third book from Billups I’ve read, and although all strong*, I think this might be the best, so far.

The novel opens with a Prologue, in which Eva remembers her ten-year-old self with her Grand-mère Marie deep among the olive trees at Beauford. Within a few sentences, Billups effortlessly conjures up the unnerving impression of something preternatural and antediluvian within the groves, which is connected to Eva’s blood and that of her maternal ancestors.

This disquieting sense of the unearthly is carried forward to present-day Boston, where Eva has successfully carried out a transfusion of her own blood to that of a young orphan girl, Sophie, with a deadly anemia diagnosis. Sophie improves miraculously but also begins to exhibit an unexplainable telepathy with Eva’s history at Beauford Grove.

Although the curious subplot involving Sophie runs beneath the main narrative and is pivotal toward the end, the majority of the novel is set in the fantastically imagined, chimerical world of Beauford Grove.  

Billups carefully works her often quite complex story, layer by intriguing layer, using Eva’s fractured memories and disconcerting observations as she reacquaints herself with the sinister Alabama estate and discovers her ancestors' journals.

Each of Eva’s recollections is weighted with significance for her in the present, and the chapters that unfold the story of her Haitian fourth great-grandmother, Celestine, and François Beauford, are beautifully wrought and haunting to read.

Indeed, Billups's lavishly detailed and elegantly embroidered prose, which is as adroit and sinuous as the groves themselves, is spellbinding, soaked in magical realism and alive with sensuous rhythm. There is a lush, dreamlike quality to her writing that whispers compellingly to the reader, as the groves whisper to Eva.

She is a strong protagonist. The close third-person perspective that Billups uses ensures the reader feels intense immediacy with her heightened emotional state and the nightmarish, visceral manifestations that she experiences.

Additionally, there is a gripping level of unpredictability in her actions, and Billups is masterful in building nerve-shredding suspense and creeping unease, especially in Eva’s rekindled relationships with Beauford Manor’s baleful housekeeper, Ernestine, and the duplicitous Adelle, scion of the Durand family, who are obligated to serve at Beauford.

Adelle’s brother, Rafe, provides romantic interest. The attraction between him and Eva carries a strange psychological charge shot through with an undercurrent of violent eroticism which, as events progress, becomes forcefully driven by the malevolent entity to which the Beauford women are bound.

As this is the first book in a series, there is no final conclusion. Nonetheless, there is a dénouement of sorts as Billups hurtles the reader into a grotesque ritualistic tableau that has a whiff of Rosemary’s Baby about it, lending the novel a touch of fantasy and taking the narrative in a bold, unexpected direction that promises much for the second instalment.

Darkly enchanting, wondrously imaginative, and utterly chilling, Beneath Beauford Grove is another stunning work of speculative fiction from Billups.  Highly recommended.

*Click here to read my review of Echoes of Ballard House.

*Click here to read my review of Keepers of the Gate: Twilight Ends Book One.

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