But what truly connects these stories is Tremblay’s particular vision of the world. “Growing Things” stands on its own, but if you’re familiar with Tremblay’s novels “A Head Full of Ghosts” and “Disappearance at Devil’s Rock,” you’ll find recurring characters, relationships that branch from one book to another, and story lines that tangle up, fusing his imaginary worlds as if by the twisting stalks of the growing things. While “Growing Things” nails the terror of weathering a disaster of nature, the other stories in this collection range beyond climate horror, exploring everything from a suicide committed under haunting circumstances in “It Won’t Go Away” to a disturbing high school instructor in “The Teacher” to the creepy notes left by dog walkers in the novella “Notes From the Dog Walkers.” Whatever the subject, Tremblay’s perspective guides the experience, bringing readers back to what interests him most: the distortions of technology, the dangerous unreliability of other people, and how we survive in a changing, often unknowable world.
When their father leaves the cabin to find food, they have no idea if he’ll ever return. “When they cut it down, it grew back faster … the shoots and tubers broke through windows and buildings.” The girls tell stories to distract themselves as the wooden stalks sprout through their basement floor, threatening to tear their home apart. 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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