I coincidentally read two books from this quest over the last few weeks: Hazelthorn and What Moves the Dead.

One thing I got to thinking about as I scrolled through the other books in this quest and compared the ones I've already read, I thought about what exactly it is that makes a lot of botanical horror so scary, and I came to this conclusion: I think one significant factor is a loss of human control over an area that humans like to think they have already come to understand, if not explicitly control. Of course, if nature is trying to kill you, that in itself is inherently scary, but one recurring motif in botanical horror is nature that, in itself, isn't evil, and yet, it's creepy, eerie, scary.

I notice a few different angles here: Books like They Bloom at Night, in which part of the eeriness is in nature changing in ways that are strange to us, where animals become new and odd and something undiscovered. Books like Sorrowland and What Moves the Dead, in which the core of the botanical horror dimension is how fungi change humans and turn them into something different. Books like Paradise Rot (not in this quest) and Hazelthorn, in which nature refusing to respect the boundaries humans attempt to set between it and human infrastructure/architecture is key to the story. I'm also thinking about Blood Orange by mars adler and the BIPoC eco-horror anthology Silk and Foxglove which features multiple stories about nature directly fighting back against humans' destruction of it.

Idk, I don't really have a conclusion to this post, I just thought it was an interesting observation how easily horrified we, as humans, are by the idea of losing to nature, particularly losing control to nature. Or, at the very least, how easily and productively usable the idea of loss of control is in botanical horror.