GROWING THINGS AND OTHER STORIES / AUTHOR: PAUL TREMBLAY / PUBLISHER: TITAN BOOKS / RELEASE DATE: 2ND JULY
For those left hungry for more after last year’s superb The Cabin at the End of the Word, the wait is now over. No less than nineteen short stories lurk between the covers of Growing Things, the latest from award-winning author Paul Tremblay. It’s a stunning showcase for his fertile imagination, with stories ranging across fifteen years, many of which have never before been published in the UK. Anyone who has read his novels may believe they know what to expect – the style of ambiguous horror that Tremblay does so well – but there is more to this bunch than meets the eye.
It kicks off with the titular story featuring sisters Merry and Marjorie Barrett in an apocalyptic vision of voracious plant-life, creating a feeling of unease that burrows into the reader’s mind and remains throughout this collection. Tremblay excels at creating great characterisation set in the strangest of circumstances, prompting empathy from the reader and ensuring there’s many a poignant moment seeded within the tales, along with some dark humour. The reader enters each story with trepidation, and Tremblay’s gift is that he can make even the most routine elements of life mysterious; families can go on vacation and find themselves caught up in events heralding the end of days, while even dog walkers are not entirely what they seem.
Tremblay doesn’t deliver big shocks, but instead builds unsettling atmosphere, each story getting under the skin of the reader, lingering like ghosts long after they have been read. While a couple of stories are experimental, that same strangeness still abounds, and there is something to be taken from every one. With his novels, and now these short stories, Tremblay has become one of the horror genre’s must-reads. Growing Things is filled with suspense and genuine fear, provokes emotions that refuse to go away, and is sure to be a book that won’t just be read and kept on a shelf, but will be picked up time and time again for the sheer joy that readers of fiction feel when being taken out of their comfort zone and chilled to the core.
