James Nicoll Reviews

Trang Thanh Tran’s They Bloom at Night is a stand-alone horror novel.

Perhaps the oligarchs will get their wish and flee to the Moon and Mars¹. The common folk have no such escape. Indeed, Nhung — Noon to her Anglophone neighbors — cannot even escape Mercy, Louisiana.

Hurricane Arlene rolled over Mercy almost two years earlier, leaving ruins and a red tide in its wake. The red tide refuses to go away, leaving Mercy a toxic wasteland. A wise person would leave.

Unfortunately for Nhung, her mother Non Bien Tien refuses to relocate. Nhung’s father and brother vanished at sea. Nhung’s mother is convinced that the pair were reincarnated by the water spirit Sông as marine animals somewhere near Mercy. Nhung’s mother will not abandon family.

Harbormaster Jimmy Boudreaux is the last rich bastard standing in Mercy, which makes Jimmy functionally the local government. Among his many commercial ventures, loans to would-be boat owners. Jimmy financed the Wild Things, Nhung’s family’s fishing boat. Therefore, Jimmy has a lot of leverage over Nhung and her mother.

Jimmy has a little job for Nhung. People keep vanishing in Mercy. Rumor has it that a monster is responsible. Maybe the monster exists. Maybe it does not. Either way, it’s Nhung’s job to track it down and capture the creature.

Accompanied by Jimmy’s knife-happy daughter Covey, Nhung sets out to search for a monster that may or may not exist. Failure will cost Nhung and her mother the Wild Things. Success means confronting something beyond human ken.

Something with an intense interest in Nhung.

I am second to no person in my enthusiastic embrace of the ever-evolving arts. Other people might freeze their tastes at age twenty-five, but not me! I am an open-minded paragon others should take as their example. No doubt someday I will be worshipped as a god. So when I say we’re living in a dark age of fucking awful murky, indistinct cover art, it’s not some old fart shouting at kids to get off the lawn.

They Bloom At Night got snagged out to my K2-sized Mount Tsundoku on the strength of its eye-catching cover. There’s a nice use of light and shadow, vivid color, and an image that doesn’t force me to magnify it 10x to work out what I am looking at².

Happily, there’s more here than just that cover, or I’d be exhorting you to go buy a print of the cover and forgo the book.

The end of the world doesn’t end the need to earn a living. It just means that doing so is hard and unpleasant. Along the same lines, just because a backwater armpit town is unfriendly territory for anyone who doesn’t fit into narrowly defined races, genders, and orientations doesn’t mean that they won’t be there. It just means their lives will be hard and unpleasant. Thus the diverse cast of the novel.

I am not sure how I will classify this novel. There are definite body-horror elements³. At the same time, while Nhung’s mother would interpret the phenomena with which Mercy is faced as divine, it’s just as reasonable to see it as a perfectly natural biological phenomena humans overlooked or misinterpreted, as humans so often do.

This isn’t exactly an enjoyable read, what with the end of the world, rapacious businessmen, prejudice, and body horror. It is, however, an enthralling read skillfully told.

They Bloom at Night is available here (Bloomsbury), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Bookshop UK), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: The US is very much delenda in this novel, along with the rest of the planet.

2: Rant brought to you by the need to provide alt-text on images posted to Bluesky and Mastodon, for which ​“I have no fucking idea what it is I am looking at here” is not an acceptable alt-text.

3: The body-horror elements may well be metaphors. That’s suspiciously literary.