Horror, science fiction and climate change all feel like ingredients to fill a novel specifically designed for yours truly. The existential dread mixed with surges of terror coated in the sheen of technological achievement is just the kind of story I need in this day and age – I know, psychotic. So when I saw Overgrowth, by Mira Grant (horror alias of Seanan McGuire), spreading its tendrils into all three of those categories, I just had to take a peek.
Anastasia Miller is the vanguard of alien invasion preparing to harvest the Earth. She’ll tell you herself since the tender age of three. No one is listening, though, and she goes through her whole life alone, unsure of whether she is telling the truth. That is until one day a mysterious signal is released by a rogue scientist that triggers something with Stasia. It isn’t long before her dreams are invaded by a strange man who seems to share her condition. The United States government also takes notice and begins to track Stasia’s whereabouts as she was one of the most well-known public figures to be spouting alien nonsense. Stasia almost welcomes the invasion, but there is one problem – her boyfriend and closest friends are all human. Can she save them from the fate of the rest of the world?
Overgrowth left me in a weird mix of emotions. As a fun horror novel that has open shout-outs to both Little Shop of Horrors and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it succeeds. The premise has the right mix of building horror tension of the latter mixed in with the absurdity of the former. Walking plant people who have a compulsion to tell you they are aliens, and an invasion is coming, but as individuals they are not hostile to the humans, is an intriguing idea. With the book being told from the perspective of Stasia, it adds to the tension as she herself doesn’t know how to handle the fact that she might be lying, but even when she discovers the truth, she struggles with how to handle it. She is unable to achieve any levels of subterfuge, though that seems to be far from her own mind, and she’s a bit of a shut-in on top of that. It leads to some darkly comedic moments as she begins to understand the position she is in and how the world starts to see her as a dangerous threat.
Grant’s ideas with Overgrowth are fun twists on and mix-ups of several different science fiction and horror staples. Some are subtle, while others are directly called out by the characters themselves. Your mileage may vary on these things depending on your knowledge. Personally, the subtle ones felt right to me. The outright call-outs are generally not my thing, but I can see their purpose. Where it wore a little thin was there were a few dialogue sections where a character would point out the similarity, a discussion would ensure before another character ended the discussion with “you’re right, it’s exactly like X.” It didn’t happen an egregious amount, but once is my limit, everything beyond that stands out like a sore thumb. But overall I was a fan of the mixing pot that Overgrowth cooked in with regards to these genre tropes.
Where I had some issues is that this book skews younger. Most of the characters are in their early to mid-thirties and beyond, but a lot of the dialogue and narration of events had a very new adult feel to them. There were several conversations about the nature of the invasion and what sort of labels people could place on the invaders, and the morality of such an invasion that felt like I was reading a left-leaning Twitter debate by well-meaning college students. It wasn’t that these conversations were unnecessary; it just felt like most of the points being made were meant to entangle the other side in a “gotcha” instead of trying to actually figure out what the hell was going on. To be fair, Stasia herself, along with all the other Earth-based alien scouts, had no contact with the main fleet so they were unsure of the exact intentions of the invasion, but there are only so many times I can handle the same debate between different groups of people. To be doubly fair, discussions of politics in America do have that theatre over substance quality to them, but that didn’t seem like the point the novel was trying to make.
The characters in general were fine, even if they suffered a little bit from arrested development. Stasia was a good voice to filter the story through, even if she was mostly an observer. Her trajectory was a little too clean for my tastes in terms of development and growth, but that’s a personal taste issue. I did enjoy her boyfriend, Graham, a trans man on the search for reptiles in the swamps of Florida. He brought up the most interesting bits of conversation and was generally a strong support for Stasia in her times of need. I wish there was a bit more to him than his near-unwavering support for Stasia, but he was above serviceable. The honest to god standout character though, was Toni, the rogue scientist responsible for leaking the alien signal to the public. She was unhinged, logical, and switched sides several times at the drop of a hat. She constantly wore a lampshade as a hat, reminding the crew that she was liable to betray them at any promise of redemption from the U.S. government. She was mean, funny, and obnoxious. Her antics do wear a little thing in the way that someone who has to be in every conversation at the party does, but she really added to the more pulpy horror aspects of the book.
Where Overgrowth falls just a bit shorter for me is that I didn’t really get much out of the ordeal. The invasion itself is anti-climactic, though I actually enjoyed this aspect. However, it just doesn’t really land for me. Usually, when something is anti-climactic purposefully, it feels like a period that cuts off a longer sentence. This instead felt like a run-on sentence that didn’t address the question it was trying to answer. There weren’t clever metaphors that alluded to climate change. The misanthropy was high, but assumed you, the reader, would bring your own hatred of mankind to fill in the blanks. Stasia herself had no real opinions on humans except for that she hated the people who bullied her at work and stole her stuff from her desk. There was a lot of talk about what the invaders were here to do, but there were no conversations about humanity’s plight or comeuppance for centuries of sin on planet Earth. There were no specific targets. It’s just a horror novel from the perspective of the carnivorous plants.
I’m going to add a little caveat, it does succeed at that aspect. It builds up an existential dread that it doesn’t really matter what humans have done up until this point, they’re just totally screwed by the invasion in some sense. This isn’t atonement, it’s natural law. And I think you can read into that if you’re having the conversation within yourself, and having been exposed to the myriad of ideas that Grant is drawing from here. But a lot of that doesn’t happen within the book itself. It’s all stuff in the aether that swirls inside my own brain as I converse with the logic of Overgrowth. Sure, some of the big ideas are mentioned – overpopulation, over-pollution, over-consumption, but they aren’t really given any context. They’re just taken at their word. And we already know how I feel about that (link for project hail mary). If you were to take this all at face value, Stasia is a nobody who just wants to exist. She lives in a world that doesn’t care about her and is on its way to hell, but look, something is coming to save her specifically. And through that act of salvation, Stasia self-actualizes to then save her friends specifically. The ones who tolerated her alien story, whether or not they totally believed it.
I did still enjoy my time with Overgrowth. Grant’s ability to describe the terror of plants attacking humans is visceral and discombobulating. The premise was well utilized even though I had frustrations with the conversations around it. There were some truly fun characters with some harrowing moments for several of them. But in the end, for me, Overgrowth is just a fun horror story that doesn’t investigate itself and hopes you’ll enjoy the ride.
Rating: Overgrowth – could have used less fertilizer and more holistic care
-Alex
An ARC of this book was provided to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The thoughts on this book are my own.
Hey this sounds really cool!