The Treehouse - B.P. Walter
The book title and author name over a bird’s eye view shot of a dirt track through a wood, with a white treehouse with a rust-red roof off to the left hand side.
The Treehouse by B.P. Walter is set to be published by One More Chapter on the 3rd July 2025.
4.5 stars
Brothers Robert and Kieran have seemingly perfect lives. Yes, they may be single, but Kieran is a lottery winner who spends his time on benders when he should be helping their mum care for their very ill father. Robert has an S1 flat, a nice, caring roommate called Albie and a job he loves. That is, until the start of a new ITV drama, when everything starts falling apart.
How can The Treehouse, the new must-see show everyone is talking about, depict in so much detail an event which happened to the brothers twenty years ago? To make matters worse, it's an event both brothers would rather forget. Just who knows what they did?
I had been meaning to read Walter’s The Garden Party for a while and finally did in June this year. Suffice it to say that I loved it, I love any author who brings queer themes to genres that don't always have them, and so when I saw Walter had another book coming out, I jumped at the chance to read and review it. It was also nice to see a little nod to that book in the mention of the Moncrieffs as the people who gifted Robert and Kieran’s mother a vase.
There's a strong mystery here that I really enjoyed, which delves into a wide variety of topics I wasn't expecting it to cover. Radicalisation, the power of the internet, and themes which seem to be prevalent in much of Walter's work like brotherhood, generational trauma, family dynamics.
My main issues with the story are with things like how conciliatory it is towards Piers Morgan (using words like ‘expert’ to describe someone who is effectively just a bigot with a megaphone is an odd choice), and the scenes of drugged-up heterosexual debauchery in the early Kieran-focussed chapters, which do get a bit tiresome. I was also disappointed by the lack of queer themes in this one, after they were so important to The Garden Party (I couldn't help but hope something might happen between Robert and Albie, if I'm completely honest). Despite this I did find The Treehouse even more intriguing than its predecessor in lots of ways. It's also a blooming good, enjoyable read generally.
This is my second of Walter's books and it definitely won't be the last, he's really great at getting you to care about morally ambiguous characters for whom the word complex doesn't even begin to cover it. And each book seems to leave you in a completely unexpected different place from where you start them at, it's insane in many different ways, and brilliant.
If you want a twisty, gripping thriller which will defy your expectations, The Treehouse is a brilliant choice (as is The Garden Party).
