Reviews

Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film by Angela Tenga, Dawn Keetley

brucemri's review

5.0

This is a fascinating collection of essays, in a sometimes eavesdropping sort of way. It's a genuine academic book, which means that the pieces are part of an ongoing conversation among scholars that I'm not always competent to follow. There are responses to others' books and essays that I haven't read and specialists' terminology that I don't know, and none of this is a sign of anything wrong, even more than there would be with the same things in a book about the geology of some part of the world I'm interested in or medical issues that include problems I have. (There are a lot of stupid takes out there about how some kinds of scholarship must be immediately accessible to lay readers. Nah.)

Fortunately for me, what I could read and understand included a whole lot of fascinating analysis. There are, unsurprisingly, multiple looks at significant plant-horror books and movies like Day of the Triffids, Little Shop of Horrors, The Thing From Another World, The Ruins, and The Happening. Beyond that there are gems like a history of plant-like squiggles and tendrils in art starting in the late 1400s through to 20th century sf cinema, a history of "green hell" and later portrayals of the plant life of the Amazon, an examination of Jean-Paul Sartre's novel Nausea and its influence on portrayals of plant life, and studies of Alan Moore and Stephen Bissette's tenure on Swamp Thing and Jan Švankmajer’s movie Otesánek. I love it when reading shows me something I didn't know I'd want to know about, alongside subjects I could have predicted I'd enjoy, and this collection does that.

I'm very glad I read this book, even though parts of it were simply not for me. What was for me was rich and satisfying.