the voting has closed and we have officially picked They Bloom at Night by Trang Thanh Tran for our unofficial spring readalong! a YA supernatural horror tagged with the line ”Monsterhood is a girl’s body you don’t belong in” and featuring algae, i’m so excited for this one! for anyone wanting a preview, you can find an excerpt from the novel here.

as always, our unofficial readalong will coincide with the official spring readalong, which will take place March 1st-May 31st! while you should direct most posts and activity to the book’s forum, you can always make a more general post about the novel, or botanical horror as a whole, in this Quest’s forum!

i will posts trigger warnings for the novel below, and while these should be comprehensive as they came from the author’s website, feel free to comment more under them in case there are some that you feel should also be noted!

happy (and spooky) reading everyone!!

Hello everyone and welcome to this quest! I'm super excited that this is shared with you all now, and to find that so many of you love botanical horror as much as I do. There's something so fascinating to me about the different ways that authors utilize plants and nature as a tool to not only strike fear in our hearts, but also create such beautiful symbolism and plotlines!

The Quest (or what I generally consider "Botanical Horror"): Horror as a genre is a pretty tricky thing sometimes, and while most of these books are clearly labelled as horror, with all the creeping terror, running for your life, etc., there are some that I felt were close enough or had a general consensus that it fit the theme of "Botanical Horror", even if they are not explicitly labelled as horror. I'm trying to keep this list as true to horror as possible, while also considering the evolution, quirks, and depth of the genre.

As for the botanical part, my general guideline for a book to be "botanical" is that it has plants/fungi as the main horror element, or generally the plants/natural landscape majorly adds to the horror vibes, which can be very vague, but I think that's part of the fun. I'm also trying to avoid making this a mainly eco-horror Quest as I think the two sub-genres do not completely intersect with each other, though you will find books like Annihilation on here that do fit into both. Of course, oftentimes eco-horror and botanical horror get intermixed (especially in reviews and lists which I have used to source these novels when I have not personally read them) so there may be a book or two that is mainly eco-horror with more of a general focus on nature/natural life included in this Quest!

In short, this list includes a wide representation of plant/fungi-life, such as fungus (ie What Moves the Dead by T Kingfisher) all the way to entire forests (ie Don't Let the Forest In by CG Drews), and that plant life/nature is itself spooky and monstrous or adds to the eerie vibes. For anyone completely new to the sub-genre and looking for somewhere to start, my personal favorites from this list are both titles mentioned above (and one is conveniently a current readalong book!)

Going Forward: I would love to start collecting more recommendations from you all to research and potentially add! Specifically, one of my favorite things about the horror genre right now is how diverse it is, and while I think I have a fairly diverse selection currently given the scope, I would always love to add more queer and BIPOC authors/novels to this Quest! So please, use this as a master recommendation thread as well for all books that you think could fit!

if anyone is ever curious, i have a shelf to keep track of all the novels im currently considering to add to the quest labeled as “Potential Adds to BH”, which is public for anyone to look at! I will say as a disclaimer that novels on there are not guaranteed to be added, they’re just ones that are on my radar! I’m not going to explain all of my rationale for adding or not adding a novel, but I do want to be clear that I do my best to research before adding anything, and that may mean reading through recommendations I’m unsure about (aka it may be awhile before a recommendation makes its way onto the Quest, if it does at all).

Please feel free to use this forum as much as want, whether it be for exploring tropes you find within these novels, or announcing new releases to keep on our radars! That's all for now, can't wait to go questing with y'all!