“Bonds in Blood and Oil”: A Review of Beneath Beauford Grove, by E. Denise Billups

 

(New York: Shivering Pond Publishing, 2025). ISBN: 9781088146774

It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly four years since I reviewed E. Denise Billups’s Civil War/modern era ghost story Tainted Harvest. Since that time, the author has written two more books in the series and fourteen overall.

I’m delighted to have the opportunity to read and review her latest.

Similar to Tainted Harvest, this book, Beneath Beauford Grove, is also a ghost story, although with significant additional paranormal and horror elements. It takes place in multiple timelines in three locations—Haiti (not long after the slave rebellion that gave Saint-Domingue its independence from France and a new name), the fictional Beauford Grove in Alabama (in the 1800s and forward to the present), and modern-day Boston. It’s in Boston that the book opens, where the protagonist, Evangeline (Eva), is a hematologist struggling with a desperate pediatric case that calls for equally desperate decisions.

The story unfolds primarily in third-person present. Some readers find this disconcerting, although it’s a choice that suits this particular work quite well, given that the novel moves through timelines and multiple character perspectives through the use of first-person present through diaries, letters, and an assortment of documents. The traditional third-person past would have made the transitions less smooth, and the fluidity of the frequent shifts in the timeline is one of the novel’s major strengths.

The book itself is visually appealing, with enriching graphics in red and black used for chapter titles.

Eva’s chosen profession is anything but arbitrary. Themes of blood and land (blood and olives) gird and drive the narrative, related to generations of Haitian and Creole women versed in the dangerous arts of blood magic and crossroads contracts. The Haitian rebellion and Southern plantation make physical, emotional, and psychological slavery and servitude ever-present spectres. Keys and ciphers are another prevalent theme—maps, chemical compositions, landscape layouts, architecture, and even birthmarks and other bodily patterns reinforce and broaden the central theme.

I was not far into the novel when I realized it is very much in the tradition of Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches trilogy and the further Mayfair books that merged with the world of the (in)famous vampire Lestat. If you loved those books and lament that there will be no more with Rice’s passing, you’ll welcome the evocative and sensual descriptive/immersive prose of Beneath Beauford Grove. While, like its predecessors, it melds spirituality/ancient ritual and science (“and certainty” as Billups writes), an entity attached to many generations of women in a Gulf state, and a driven scientist protagonist, there is one major difference—Eva is infinitely more likable than Rowan Fielding/Mayfair. As for the entity, it is every bit as deceitful, ruthless, and evil as the Taltos. The price this family has paid for keeping the olive grove thriving is truly horrific in its accounting of sacrifice, manipulation, and blood.   

A great strength of this Southern gothic novel is the intertwining of time, place, and character to amplify the spiritual/science nexus, manifest in the images of Celtic-like olive roots that match platelet aggregation patterns. The core themes of the novel, mirroring those of the central characters, are consistently expressed. Even the local bank traffics in blood debts and digital currency.

The inciting incident, a letter tied to an impending death (which is compelling, classical, and clean) conjures questions of the futility of attempting to escape one’s destiny. The deep blood bonds and inheritance of a cursed/infested place are similar to those in Stephen King’s short story “Jerusalem’s Lot” and the television adaptation with Adrian Brody, Chapelwaite (New England Gothic).

These are potent narrative formulas and Billups makes the very most of them.

Supporting the themes and locations are an interesting array of characters, the vast majority of which are drawn inexorably up and into the fate of the olive groves and the women who sacrifice to keep them, and the town, thriving. There is layer upon layer (like rich, loamy soil) of metaphor and meaning at work here. Like in the stories of Master Poe, many of the characters are delightfully untrustworthy. One in particular, who is constantly offering a variety of beverages to Eva, called to mind the conniving neighbor played so beautifully by Ruth Gordon in Rosemary’s Baby (Manhattan Gothic). Throughout, Billups brings these characters to life with dialect and healthy sprinklings of Creole, expertly contextualized or organically translated. She’s also versed in Vodou (and although unstated, the related practice of Obeah), including legbas, the nature of crossroads, the mixing of potions with plants and herbs, and grimoires.

With multiple timelines and character voices to manage, Billups has employed a variety of techniques to deliver information. A beautifully rendered grimoire is one of several examples, which also include diaries and letters. House and grove staff speak freely of history and legend, and there are the requisite whispered conversations between conspirators.

Like the olive grove, the family home is encoded. The nursery, a forbidden wing, a root cellar, and several bedrooms offer clues to the larger story. Eva also gleans information from visits to the town cemetery (where the Beauford women have buried all of their prematurely deceased husbands) and that bastion of data in any mystery thriller, the local café.    

In the end, this Southern Gothic masterwork is a love story as deep and intertwined as the soil and trees of the grove. Do we have the right to bargain away future generations’ lives and freedom of choice for our own immediate, egocentric needs? What price do we put on the lives and futures of our loved ones? How many secrets can we bear? In myriad sectors of life on this planet, from macro to micro, the outcomes of these choices have been dire.

Billups, while entertaining us, gives us much about which to think.

Beneath Beauford Grove is not the end of the story for Eva, the entity, or the engaging assortment of supporting characters that enrich and enliven this novel. If you’d like a taste of what’s to come, Billups offers interested readers several pages of the sequel.