Eat the Ones You Love

Shell Pine is thirty-three. She has just lost her design job and ended a long engagement, and now lives with her parents again in Dublin. A handwritten sign in a mall florist's window gives her somewhere to be each morning. Neve, the shop's owner, gives her a reason to want to stay.

The Woodbine Crown Mall is closing within the year, half its units already dark. But something has taken root at its center that intends to outlast the demolition crews. Baby is a carnivorous orchid that has fed on Neve since she was sixteen, when she first sheltered in her aunt's flower shop. It reads Shell's arrival as a threat to the hold it has kept ever since.

As Shell and Neve grow close, Baby moves through pollen and root to turn affection into isolation. It folds Neve further from anyone who might notice what is happening to her. Neve's ex-girlfriend Jenn recognizes the signs from across town and comes back to Dublin to stop the plant before it finishes what it started.

The novel is horror grown from soil rather than shadow. Workplace romance and body horror tangle together in a dying mall, its menace patient and floral, building toward a confrontation among the shuttered shopfronts.