Plant-based horror has a long history, and horror with fungal elements has become particularly popular in the last few years, from longer fiction like Megan E. O’Keefe’s The Blighted Stars and T. Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead to numerous short stories and poems. What makes Saskia Nislow’s new horror novella Root Rot stand out is its superb style, using simple, child’s-view prose to express conflicting perspectives and narratives as creeping dread comes slowly into focus.
The setup is that after a hiatus of several years, an extended family is resuming its tradition of coming together to spend a summer vacation with Grandfather at his Lake House. The reader spends time settling in with the nine children who’ve arrived, who are identified as their roles rather than by name: The Oldest, The Boy Twin, The Girl Twin, The Liar, The One Who Runs Away, The Crybaby, The Secret Keeper, The One with the Beautiful Voice, and the Baby. I rather liked having these labels, which are simpler than trying to remember what characteristics go with each of nine names, but of course they do tend to lock their bearers into these roles; for instance, when The Liar notices things getting weird, the other children don’t want to hear about it from her.
The story is told in third person past tense, with rotating looks at different children’s thoughts, but occasional references to actions that “we” take or reactions that “we” have. So it looks like the children are telling the story collectively after the fact, but eventually it becomes apparent that another interpretation is possible.
Left largely to themselves except for the large family dinner each night, the children explore the house, the fields, the woods, and the river. Sometimes they’re all together, but sometimes smaller groups of two or three detach themselves when one of them says they want to talk to somebody, or show them something. Often there is disagreement about where someone is and who was supposed to have been watching the younger ones. Often someone goes missing for a while, and when they finally reappear, they look different at first, until someone concentrates on them and decide that no, they look just like they should. The same occasionally happens with parts of the landscape, except that the sky oddly fails to show the stars that are reflected in the lake. Additionally, the food sometimes tastes funny. Time itself displays confusing ripples.
Most of the time, the children don’t mention these oddities to each other, unless it’s something major like The Baby going missing. They think they must be misinterpreting things, and when anyone does voice concerns, the others argue them down, telling them they’re mistaken, misremembering, or just telling a story. After all, it’s so much easier and pleasanter to think that everything must be fine, and it’s one’s perceptions that are skewed, rather than the situation; surely, if something were wrong, one of The Adults would step in and fix it.
(This may be taken as a chilling allegory for our current times, but I have no idea whether the author intended it that way.)
This gaslighting and self-gaslighting of concerns and conflict is as horrific to me as the weird and scary dreams (or are they dreams?) the children have and the unsettling excursions the children take; the disturbing discoveries they make, and then ignore, are presages of what’s coming for those not yet directly affected, but their numb acquiescence to learned helplessness makes the omens useless as the possible evolves toward the inevitable.
Root Rot is a horror novella with Southern Gothic themes (eccentric characters undergoing sinister events in a setting that’s decaying from past grandeur), although it’s not specified where the Lake House is, or when (although planes and TVs are mentioned briefly). It’s about children and told in simple, direct (if ambiguous) language, but I definitely don’t recommend it for children, nor for many YA readers. I do strongly recommend it for people who enjoy reading skillfully told tales of suspense, sifting shifting viewpoints, and surveying family/group dynamics, and for anyone who sometimes thinks that What Moves the Dead was too optimistic. I found it moodily gripping, and I will certainly keep an eye on Saskia Nislow’s writings going forward.
Root Rot, by Saskia Nislow, is coming March 25 from feminist horror press Creature Publishing.
Content warnings: Horror, body horror, fungus, gaslighting, dysfunctional family, heavily implied harm to children.
Comps: What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher, “Frogs” movie (1972), We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson.
Disclaimer: The publisher sent me an Advanced Reader Copy of this for review.
