They Bloom at Night

January 15, 2025
A Vietnamese American teen searches for something monstrous in a post-apocalyptic near future. Twenty-one months ago, Hurricane Arlene left the town of Mercy, Mississippi, waterlogged and its economy devastated. Worse, red algae lingers, enveloping everything from buildings to fish in a blood-red bloom. Now, Noon and Mom scavenge the contaminated waters in their shrimp trawler, looking for traces of Noon's brother and father, who superstitious Mom believes have been reincarnated as sea creatures. Noon, who has never felt comfortable anywhere--"I have always been different. Iam different"--feels at home in this strange new landscape. But things are becoming stranger still: The wildlife is mutating, Noon's body is mysteriously changing, and people are going missing at an alarming rate. Jimmy Boudreaux, a crooked businessman and a tyrannical local boss figure, believes that a monster is stalking the waters. Using the loan Noon's parents owe him as leverage, Jimmy extorts Noon into helping him hunt it down. With Jimmy's ornery daughter, Covey, in tow, Noon returns to Mercy to investigate. The teens discover the shocking, skin-crawling truth about what's overtaken the region--and Noon grapples with long-suppressed wounds. Tran fills the pages with sensory detail, creating a haunting setting that immerses readers in their worldbuilding. Noon is a complex and multifaceted protagonist, whose reckoning with trauma and selfhood (especially gender identity and Vietnamese ancestry) is the emotional center anchoring the extraordinary plot events. Overflowing with horrors--and with heart.(Horror. 14-18)

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March 1, 2025
In the wake of a hurricane, a strange red algal bloom has taken over the waters of Mercy, Louisiana, where Noon ekes out a life capturing mutant sea creatures and trading them to the crooked harbormaster. As people go missing, rumors of a monster emerge, and Noon must hunt down the monster for the harbormaster or risk losing everything. The mission forces Noon to team up with the harbormaster's daughter to probe the mysteries haunting the town, all the while threatening to expose the monstrous things inside our own protagonist. Tran (She Is a Haunting) makes deft use of horror genre conventions to construct a narrative about how trauma shapes and changes people. The atmospheric, immersive descriptions of the setting underscore the vital symbiotic relationship between human and nature that gets ignored in the pursuit of capitalistic extraction. Noon's narrative perspective encourages identification with the shadowy Other of the monster. As a child of Vietnamese refugees, a queer person who feels out of place in their body (the occasional pronouns used in the first-person narration shift from she/her to they/them), and a survivor of sexual violence, Noon knows what it means to suffocate under the pressure of oppressive norms that seek to punish their self-expression and neutralize its subversive potential. Freeing the monster in themself means confronting their traumatic past and embracing their own power of unsettling. Shenwei Chang

(Copyright 2025 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

Starred review from March 1, 2025

Gr 9 Up-After a devastating hurricane, the water keeps rising in tiny Mercy, LA, where a deadly, clinging red algae has begun to warp biology into something unrecognizable. To avoid the memories and dangers in town, Vietnamese American teen Nhung and her mom have been living on their family's shrimp boat on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, catching increasingly rare seafood to afford to live. Forced to sell the most normal things they catch to local business criminal Jimmy Boudreaux, they have no way out when he demands they hunt down whoever (or whatever) is responsible for a string of local disappearances; Nhung's mother's attempts to resist leave her with a raging tetanus infection. Jimmy's sharp-edged daughter Covey and Nhung forge ahead into Mercy, where the difference between hunter and hunted is hard to discern. As Nhung struggles with familial and cultural expectations, especially those tied to gender, she diverges from the path she has long felt was inevitable and allows herself to contemplate becoming something more authentic. After all, there is beauty to be found even in the darkest of places. Tran's adeptness with body horror resurfaces in this sophomore novel; the shifting environment of south Louisiana can be dangerous and untrustworthy at the best of times, perfectly suited to blurred boundaries between science and reality and powerful emotional reckonings. VERDICT A strange and grisly tale of what we can survive to get closer to our truest selves, deeply infused with Vietnamese cultural concepts.-Allie Stevens

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