Spoilt Creatures, Amy Twigg
“I guarantee readers will be both enthralled and disgusted by this fascinating, furious, and utterly feral novel.”
“My loyalty to the other women – to Blythe, and Hazel – outweighed any doubt or rationale. Like a body, I buried it.”
Female Rage is having a moment and I’m not mad about it. If you’re subscribed to the Rage Appreciation Club, Amy Twigg’s fierce debut needs to find its way to your bedside table.
Spoilt Creatures – with a title stemming from a letter Vita Sackville-West wrote to Virginia Woolf – is a heady haze of a book that raises vital questions about power structures, cruelty, and the bitter violence that can grow out of unquestioned hierarchy. Our way inside Breach House, the women-only commune where the narrative unfolds, is Iris – a lost, unmoored, recently single 32-year-old looking for an escape from the mundanity and claustrophobia of her uneventful life and dead-end career.
Breach House, a remote and rural ruin, is presented as a safe space that will grant Iris the opportunity to escape a world of misery and, more specifically, the men who have let her down. The women who live there – all of whom are escaping something or someone – appear free to be loud, dirty, and unguarded, but they all exist under the inescapable watchful eye of their matriarch, Blythe. Quite soon, what should have been a safe space quickly reveals itself as a self-contained malfunctioning community.
As the sun beats down on the women’s bare bodies, this supposed haven begins to feel restrictive, simmering with petty disagreements and growing divisions between the women. In short, the dynamics within Breach House begin to reflect the problems of the outside world Iris hoped to escape – played out in a sweaty, isolated refuge. Twigg’s intoxicating debut comes to a climax when a group of men infiltrate the farm, the commune is thrown into question, and the women hurtle chaotically towards an act of devastating violence.
An unapologetic and all-encompassing exploration of female rage, power structures, and the entrapment of cults, I guarantee readers will be both enthralled and disgusted by this fascinating, furious, and utterly feral novel.
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