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beckylouise2904's review
4.0
A mixed bag of short tales with the botanical gothic themes - enjoyable if you love anthologies!
octavia_cade's review
4.0
I'm reviewing this for Strange Horizons, so the full review will be up there eventually, but I really enjoyed this. Pandemic has played havoc with my reading, but this is the first book since it's begun that I've just swallowed down in quiet happiness. The stories are all about killer plants, as you can probably surmise from the title, and admittedly the anthology can tend a little to the one-note. The Venus fly-trap, and various carnivorous relations, play a large role in many of these stories, for instance. But slightly repetitive as some of these choices are, the stories chosen are nearly all well-written and enjoyable. Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" is I think the best, but the prize for loveliest prose certainly goes to Abraham Merritt's "The Woman of the Wood." It's a shame, in a way, that this is a complete volume. The stories here date from the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries, and it would be interesting to see how perceptions of the botanical Gothic have changed when it comes to more contemporary horror. There needs to be a follow-up anthology, I think!
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