![]() ![]() Indeed, the growing things are unstoppable. They arrived in New York City, “shooting up, crowding out the grass and trees, the flower beds,” of Central Park, growing “a foot an hour.” They took over the Midwest, killing the crops. Invasive, to say the least, the growing things are taking over human territory. ![]() Two sisters, Marjorie and Merry, are trapped in a “creaky old cabin” as their “squirrelly” father paces the mudroom, trying to work out how to survive the growing things. In the title story of “Growing Things,” nature has gone berserk. In these 19 stories, Tremblay doesn’t just hold a mirror up to reality, but live-streams it, projecting the whole spectrum of our modern anxieties so vividly it feels as if we’re watching in real time. The answer comes from masterful horror writers like Paul Tremblay, whose excellent collection GROWING THINGS (Morrow, 352 pp., $25.99), does what we expect the work of our best writers to do: reflect our world from a surprising perspective so that we might better see its beauty and contradictions, its comforts and aches. With temperatures reaching 123 degrees in India and mass shootings continuing unabated and honey bees going the way of dodo birds, one can’t help wondering: What is the point of dark fiction when reality gives us so much to fear? Why read horror fiction when there is such an abundance of terror in the real world? It’s a question I ask as someone who seeks out the macabre in literature, even as I cringe at the daily news. ![]()
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