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Book: “They Bloom At Night” by Trang Thahn Tran
Publishing Info: Bloomsbury YA, March 2025
Where Did I Get This Book: I received an ARC from the publisher at ALAAC24.
Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound
Book Description: A red algae bloom has taken over Mercy, Louisiana. Ever since a devastating hurricane, mutated wildlife lurks in the water that rises by the day. But Mercy has always been a place where monsters walk in plain sight. Especially at its heart: The Cove, where Noon’s life was upended long before the storm at a party her older boyfriend insisted on.
Now, Noon is stuck navigating the submerged town with her mom, who believes their dead family has reincarnated as sea creatures. Alone with the pain of what happened that night at the cove, Noon buries the truth: she is not the right shape.
When Mercy’s predatory leader demands Noon and her mom capture the creature drowning residents, she reluctantly finds an ally in his deadly hunter of a daughter and friends old and new. As the next storm approaches, Noon must confront the past and decide if it’s time to answer the monster itching at her skin.
Review: Thank you to Bloomsbury YA for providing me with an ARC of this novel at ALAAC24!
It’s almost March, and yet I am here once again with an ARC I got at ALAAC last summer. I always find it funny when I still have a few lingering finds from the conference, especially since the next one is only four months away, but let me tell you this find was one I was really excited about. “They Bloom At Night” is the new YA horror novel by Trang Thahn Tran, and it was well worth the wait. Because like any good horror novel, it’s not the just horror stuff that brings the goods, it’s also the commentary about the world in which we are living.
Let’s look at the horror stuff first. Like in their previous novel “She Is A Haunting”, Tran brings rich perspectives to well loved horror sub-genres. This time it’s a combination of body horror as well as eco horror. The eco horror is the settling, as we are in a small town in Louisiana after a hurricane has ravaged it, with a toxic and mysterious algae bloom basically engulfing the waters that the town has depended on to survive. This kind of setting is unfortunately feeling more and more timely, and I thought it was a great place to make comment on the climate crisis and how it can have so many effects that some may not think of. After all, it’s not just mutated sea life and mysterious monsters that are a threat in this book, but a community teetering towards financial ruin and a corrupt self proclaimed leadership that has taken over as well. You feel the desperation in Mercy and the people who live there, and the added horrors of rumors of mutated sea creatures can only make it worse.
And as someone who has a hard time with body horror (I still haven’t seen “The Substance” even though it has so many accolades!), it was very well done, balancing out the nasty with the more fantastical. The descriptions of the mutations caused by the bloom had their moments of me thinking ‘oh YUCK’, which is exactly what I’d expect from body horror, and they could vary from being generally creepy to outright nasty. And hey, I’m never big on the nasty, but the creepy? I really loved the creepy here. Especially the caution about ignoring ‘the knocks’ at the door after dark. Good gracious. But if you like the nasty, never fear, because yeah, some really disgusting transformations happen in this book, especially for those who have been a little too exposed to the bloom, as body parts rot away, skins get sloughed off, or mutilations are put to the forefront. For our protagonist Noon, the body horror bits are slow and meticulous, starting with her hair turning white, but then becoming more and more alarming.
I also really enjoyed the dichotomy between the physical transformation that Noon is experiencing and the way that she is starting to realize that she is starting to shift her own ideas about who she is, whether it’s due to having to confront the trauma of being sexually assaulted, losing her father and brother, or realizing that she is still trying to suss out her own gender identity. It’s not like using the ideas of body horror as a metaphor for transformation of multiple kinds is new, but I thought that Tran really differentiated between some of the more disgusting elements (see above) and the more ethereal and liberating ones, even as Noon was turning into something else than she had been before, whether it’s because of her exposure to the bloom or her confronting the trauma and loss. It’s gratifying to see that this transformation, at least for Noon, could be depicted as a positive, and her journey to finally finding peace with herself in spite of the horrors that surround her. It made for a very emotional read, and I was very invested in her as a character, as well as the other ‘othered’ characters around her.
I really enjoyed “They Bloom At Night”.
Rating 8: A creepy and sometimes nasty combination of eco and body horror, “They Bloom At Night” is also an examination of trauma and gender identity against the backdrop of a ravaged climate.
Reader’s Advisory:
“They Bloom At Night” is included on the Goodreads lists “Trans and Nonbinary Fiction 2025”, and “Horror To Look Forward To in 2025”.
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