The Poison Tree | South China Morning Post

The Poison Tree
by Erin Kelly
Hodder

Daily Mail and Cosmopolitan contributor Erin Kelly, at 34, has penned an extraordinary tour du force set largely during that memorable English summer of 1997, bookended by Tony Blair's stunning electoral victory and the death of Princess Diana.

A mousey nonentity, Karen Clarke, meets Biba Capel, a drama student attending the same nondescript London college, and they strike up an incongruous friendship. The thrilling bohemian lifestyle of the extrovert and strangely magnetic Biba intrigues Karen. Then, while developing a crush on Biba, Karen swiftly forsakes her anodyne suburban existence for life with her new friend and her weird brooding brother, Rex, in a crumbling mansion located on the edge of London's dreamy and pastoral Queen's Wood.

Karen soon learns the siblings are squatters in their own childhood home, and that the Capel family has been devastated by tragedy. We will her to leave before she gets hurt, but Karen's having the time of her life in the Capels' libertine world of booze, drugs, sexual indulgence and zero responsibility. There's plenty of foreshadowing that more tragedy is about to strike the Capels, and anyone in their crazy maelstrom.

She might have first struck Karen as an exciting coquette, but it is Biba's toxic personality that drives the narrative's downward spiral into unspeakable horror.

The novel toggles between the events of that fateful summer and the present, somewhere near the city but in a place that is stripped of colour by Karen's burgeoning paranoia. In the present, Rex, having spent a decade in prison for some terrible crime that Kelly keeps us guessing about, is now an ex-con married to Karen and is a doting dad to their nine-year-old daughter. The family is clearly haunted. But by what exactly?

Kelly does suspense well. The explosive ending, with its revelations about the lengths to which these characters will go to preserve their delusions, delivers a climax worthy of Alfred Hitchcock.

The Poison Tree is palpably cinematic, and Hollywood is probably eyeing this story for adaptation as you read this.

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