Newly single, stuck in a mediocre job and back living in her childhood home with a depressive mother, Iris feels defeated by life. When salvation is offered in the form of Breach House, a remote women’s commune and apparent safe haven, she leaps at the chance of healing and renewal. But the sisterhood is not all it promises to be, as mind games and acts of cruelty spiral into a sequence of devastating events. With an undercurrent of niggling dread, Spoilt Creatures by Amy Twigg is a compelling and atmospheric cult story with a difference.
We know from the very beginning that Iris’s time at Breach House ended in catastrophe. She tells us so from the vantage point of recollection, hiding behind an adopted persona in an unnamed city in 2018. The event (obscured from us until the bitter end) has clearly passed into the annals of infamy, from the bloody photos and media outrage of the day, to years later, stained artefacts from the commune being sold on eBay, casual references on TV panel shows, and the inevitable Netflix show.
Iris takes us back to pre-Breach House, a decade earlier, when living with her mother and at her lowest ebb, she meets Hazel, a copper-haired free spirit and resident of the commune. It’s not a retreat or refuge, Hazel says, it’s a place for women, safe, quiet, and self-sustaining, headed by a magnetic woman named Blythe. A place where Iris could thrive.
Later, in the car, en-route to her new home at Breach Place, the landscape is prescient.
‘Civilisation gradually fell away…the feminine spread of land, ribs of forest and the Stour, which ran like a silty vein throughout.’
Deservedly chosen as an Observer Best Debut Novelist 2024, Twigg brings an interesting twist to our preconceptions of life in a communal settlement. In Spoilt Creatures, she explores the borderlands between commune and cult and asks whether an all-female space can ever be an assurance of freedom from violence.
For Iris, Breach House initially feels like an awakening. The physicality of working in the kitchen gardens, ruddy from the sun and with newfound muscles, the companionable, confiding nature of her peers. Bonds are formed, some oddly childlike (playing hide and seek in the house and grounds), others of a more adult nature, as Iris is increasingly attracted to her mentor, Hazel.
Meanwhile the all-pervasive aura of Blythe hangs over them all. Their leader is large in stature and personality, and whilst often away from the house, walking and contemplating, her philosophies are scored on the minds of her brood.
‘We cannot let the outside world in. Women are treated like dogs in the outside world…But here, here we can control our circumstances’.
Except, of course, they can’t. Danger arrives via an obvious and sadly ironic source, and this group of vulnerable, cloistered women begins to fragment and sour.
A striking debut that delivers a quiver of menace and much food for thought. We’re already looking forward to Twigg’s next novel.
Spoilt Creatures by Amy Twigg is published by Tinder Press, 336 pages.
