Camilla Bruce twists fae magic with a domestic thriller in her slick debut, You Let Me In. Everyone believes missing prolific novelist Cassandra Tipp is dead. Yet her final manuscript tells two disturbing stories: the one people would rather believe, about an abused girl driven to madness, and the one Cassie dares them to trust, about her faerie companion Pepper-Man, "always in [her], tooth and claw," whose world bled into her own.
Pepper-Man always accompanied Cassie, even if no one else could see. Her mother punished Cassie for hiding his morbid trinkets ("a ring made from deer spine, a necklace of frogs' legs and hawthorn") and blood stains from invisible bites--"traces of [Pepper-Man's] love." Her father, "like a bear, just watched it all." Straddling two worlds, Cassie seems inextricable. Was she spitefully violent toward her hateful sister, or was she counteracting fae curses? Did she kill her husband, or did he just appear to be human when really he was made of twigs enchanted by a spell? Her therapists believed Cassie constructed an alternate world to cope with trauma, but could a place vivid enough to taste be illusion?
Bruce crafts an intricate web of trauma. Pepper-Man embodies the grim specter of abuse cloaked in sweetness. He "bound [Cassie] with powerful shackles," yet she feels loved--a fantastic representation of how victims justify their abusers. Bruce allows the reader indecisiveness: Cassie doesn't evangelize the fae's existence as an unreliable narrator might, only suggesting "one thing being true doesn't mean that the other thing is untrue." Readers will devour every crumb of this story, luscious as fae cake, about a woman empowered to choose what life she lived. --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer