The Blight (Book 2 of Beneath Beauford Grove)
by E. Denise Billups
Rating: *****
In The Blight, Billups' masterful second installment in her Southern Gothic-soaked Beneath Beauford Grove series*, Eva Beauford, pregnant with a child conceived during the ritual at the end of Book One, must unravel generations of family secrets and confront the ancient curse before a supernatural blight consumes those she loves, her community, and the Alabama groves themselves.
As Eva’s partner, Rafe, fights the entity Veidrel from within, and the baby growing inside her develops at an alarmingly unnatural rate, each revelation brings her closer to a confrontation that will determine her fate and that of her unborn child…
Once again, Billups draws readers into the haunting, darkly atmospheric world of Beauford Grove, rich in Haitian spiritual lore and infused with antediluvian malignancy. The Blight begins just six days after the ritual and is relentlessly intense from the start, proving both disquieting and utterly compelling.
This narrative claustrophobia is amplified by Billups' use of the present tense throughout, creating a visceral sense of immediacy that reinforces the story’s mounting dread and suffocating tension.
Billups’ writing is beautifully intricate without being indulgent, lush yet carefully wrought, and richly layered with lyrical imagery and symbolism. Despite the gorgeous ornamentation of her prose, the plot, even with several connecting strands across past, present, and future, remains taut and focused, and the pacing is brisk.
Eva is, once again, a hugely investable main protagonist whose evolution through this book is convincing within context. Billups cleverly gives her flaws, she is not always likable, which makes her relatable. Although the paranormal swirls around her and within her, her motivations are resolutely human.
Indeed, Eva's all-encompassing love for Rafe, along with her ingrained maternal instinct and moral courage, drives much of the novel's action and emotional resonance. Maternalism emerges as a central theme of The Blight, expressed not only through motherhood itself but also through acts of protection, sacrifice, nurturing, and responsibility that extend back through the Beauford matriarchal line. Eva's impulse to preserve life, even at great personal cost, becomes a defining force in the narrative and a powerful contrast to the novel's darkness, violence, and corruption.
The weight of Evangeline and Adelle's betrayal at the end of the previous book carries into The Blight, and Billups maintains a lingering whiff of suspicion on each, especially Adelle, which, personally, is never wholly dispelled.
Cousin Laurel and niece Sophie are integral to this novel. Sophie’s premonitions, rendered through her artwork, are vivid and lend a spine-tingling frisson of otherworldly insight. The twist involving Sophie might have felt like an implausible coincidence in a lesser novel. Instead, it feels wholly consistent because Billups has deftly woven questions of inheritance, ancestry, and destiny so tightly into the story's fabric and has laid the emotional groundwork with precision.
Father Augustin, the eighteenth-century Haitian houngan, sits at the center of the novel's spiritual mythology and plays a pivotal role in Eva's journey and that of the life she carries. The chapters featuring him are among the novel's darkest and most atmospheric. Steeped in Haitian ritualism, they possess a mythic quality, deepening the knowledge that the evil within Beauford Grove extends far beyond the present day.
As Eva's labor rapidly approaches, Billups ratchets up the intensity and foreboding to almost unbearable levels, with Rafe's fate, the spread of the blight, and the impending birth converging in an arcane rite of invocation at the base of the Mother Tree.
The Blight is a worthy successor to Beneath Beauford Grove. Beautifully written, intense, and powerful, Billups has crafted a fascinatingly imaginative, unsettling novel marinated in Gothic horror and mesmerizing to read from beginning to end.
*Click here for my review of Beneath Beauford Grove.
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