How Much Do You Trust Your House Plants?

If you haven’t read This Poison Heart yet (or it’s recent sequel This Wicked Fate) I highly recommend adding this delightful dark and fantastical YA series to your list. Plants are at the very heart of this book — from Briseis’ magical ability to grow plants from seed to full bloom with just a touch of her hand (a gift that also renders her immune to some of nature’s most deadly poisons) to the amazing and at times frightening gardens that surround the estate that she mysteriously inherits from an Aunt she never knew existed.

I finally get to talk about Eden in a newsletter, yay! It’s one of my favorite works of eco-horror, and is about an uncomfortably near future where the planet has been ravaged by climate change. And humanity’s attempts to save the planet by setting aside Virgin Zones — massive swaths where people have been driven out where the land has been given back to nature — has backfired in frightening ways. Of the zones, Eden is the oldest and the most mysterious. Mainly because people who go into the zone tend not to come out again. Which doesn’t bode well for our cast of adventure racers as they set out to cross the zone in record time, not realizing that Eden has secrets she’ll kill to keep.

Part of the British Library Tales of the Weird series, Evil Roots is a collection of stories from writers of the 19th and early 20th century, all about the great and sinister evils of plants. Readers will likely recognize several of the names on the table of contents, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, H.G. Wells, M.R. James, and more. Each story explores some strange, scary, and often lethal aspect of plant life, be it carnivorous plants of the deep jungle or unsettling experiments involving the merger of botany and biology. It’s a fantastical and frightening homage to the stories that birthed the Killer Plant trope we know and love today.

Listen, I love this collection from top to bottom. But this freaking story has to be the scariest of the lot. I read it ages ago and it STILL gives me the willies just thinking about the Sunflower Man. It’s a breathtaking story about grief and what we think we’d do to get back the ones we love. I know I’ve recommended this collection a few times in The Fright Stuff, but believe me when I say: buy it for “The Sunflower Seed Man,” stay for all the unforgettable stories that Sharma spins.