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“A terrifying page-turner about a single mom and mycologist battling an insidious enemy for her child’s soul. Chilling, heart-pounding, and utterly gruesome. This eco-horror is my favorite Ferencik novel yet!” —Robyn Harding, internationally bestselling author of Strangers in the Villa
To save her seven-year-old daughter, a single mother must confront a sentient fungal entity that has invaded their lives in this chilling new novel from the acclaimed author of The River at Night and Girl in Ice.
In the rainy suburbs of Boston, where humidity lingers and fungal blooms thrive in every damp corner, scientist and single mother Dani Walters notices a disturbing change in her young daughter after the girl eats wild mushrooms from their backyard. Once sweet and affectionate, she has become sullen and secretive, claiming to hear a voice that demands she do terrible things—butwhen Dani confronts her, she blames an imaginary friend.
As her daughter’s behavior grows more frightening, Dani searches desperately for an explanation, fearing the early onset of a psychological disorder that runs in their family. Or, as Dani’s father insists, is it something darker—something evil?
As a fungal eruption engulfs the basement of their home, spreading with an intelligence and purpose that defies everything Dani knows about the natural world, the bond between mother and daughter will face its most terrifying test.
A nightmare of ecological and psychological horror, this dark and unforgettable novel asks: What if the person you most love became the very thing you most fear?
“The Blooming is perfectly-orchestrated horror, claustrophobic and insidious. Ferencik layers dread and revulsion on top of parental fears until you can’t stop turning the pages! Compulsory reading for horror readers. I loved it!”
—Christopher Golden, New York Times bestselling author of Carry Me to My Grave and Road of Bones
"Erica Ferencik's taut, creepy: The Blooming drops Dani, a single mom and PhD student, and her daughter Piper into an ecological and psychological nightmare."
– Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep
“I read Erica's Ferencik's relentlessly tense and eerie novel The Blooming with my heart in my mouth, choked by the insidious horrors germinating deeper and darker with every page. The Blooming is a stifling blend of maternal paranoia, childhood crisis, and cataclysmic scientific discovery as a mycologist mother suspects a disturbing new form of mushroom has established itself in her daughter, altering her behavior and channeling a nightmare from their past. A spore-core tour de force.”
– Leigh Radford, author of One Yellow Eye
"A brilliant, twisted nail-biter of a novel about motherhood, guilt, grief, and how far we will go to save someone we love. Ferencik's characters take root and grow in the most disturbingly surreal set of circumstances I've had the pleasure of encountering in fiction. After reading The Blooming, you'll never look at mushrooms the same way. Smart, sharp, emotionally fraught ecohorror that clings to your imagination and doesn't let go. A darkly entertaining read."
– Paulette Kennedy, bestselling author of The Devil and Mrs. Davenport
“Horror gets under your skin best when it wears the face of someone you love. Erica Ferencik understands this in her bones. The Blooming is a portrait of a mother watching her daughter disappear into something she cannot name and cannot stop, and it is absolutely merciless. The fungal horror is visceral and invasive, but the most gripping element of this novel is the relationship at its center. Mother-daughter bonds rarely get this kind of treatment in the genre, and Ferencik makes you feel every agonizing inch of that love. I read this one with my hands over my mouth.”
– Crystal King, author of The Happiness Collector and In The Garden of Monsters
“What if that which you most loved and that which you most feared coexisted in the same bespectacled 7-year-old girl? What if that girl was your daughter? Erica Ferencik brilliantly realizes this nightmarish scenario in a pulse-revving eco-horror novel that falls somewhere between ‘The Bad Seed’ and ‘The Last of Us.’ Pure, desperate love between mother and child is the only defense against a blooming invasion that’s both insidious and monstrously beautiful. At a time when readers are enthralled with tales of kingdom Fungi, this story offers fresh terrors animated by sharp, evocative writing.”
- Rebecca Baum, author of The Brood
A chilling, enviably brilliant reimagining of The Exorcist as fungal horror about a sentient entity that possesses the seven-year-old daughter of a single mom. Ferencik proved her chops with three first-rate survival thrillers (The River at Night, Into the Jungle, Girl in Ice); in The Blooming, she cranks up the suspense to sweat-sodden-bedsheet levels with a terrifying parental nightmare of pure ecohorror. This is a nail-biting, squirm-inducing, emotionally gripping, ecologically topical tale of terror about a mother, her daughter, and the "demon" we summon with every involuntary breath we draw. The Blooming is not to be missed!
- Sean Carlin, author of The Dogcatcher
“Fresh horrors threaten to emerge from every page of this engrossing, viscerally terrifying novel, as if cued by the fungal entity at its core–an entity that poses life-and-death tests of maternal love and the destruction of the world as we’ve come to know it. Teeming with tendriling, squelching thrills, this novel is a masterwork of ecohorror.”
– Beth Castrodale, author of The Inhabitants
The Blooming is both a suspenseful thriller for our troubled times and an emotionally gripping mother/daughter showdown for the ages. Every Mom’s nightmare comes to frightening life in these pages…this book dramatizes an extreme, yet believable vision of Motherhood run amuck, dark impulses mixing with fierce love.
- Elizabeth Searle, screenwriter (I’ll Show You Mine) and author (Lock Her Up)
Historical family traumas lie just beneath the surface, connecting the past and present like roots that infect new generations with their awful, violent blooms in Erica Ferencik’s chilling new novel, The Blooming. The subterranean forces guiding and controlling Ferencik’s characters prove overwhelming, breaking hearts and minds and urging them toward violence and domination. After reading this novel, one may wish to stay out of the basement following a heavy rain; you don’t know what poison can spring forth when secrets are kept in the dank and dark long enough.”
— Marc E. Fitch, author of Boy in the Box and Dead Ends
“From its very first scene, The Blooming thrusts you into an unsettling state of dread, ratcheting up the tension unrelentingly until it reaches an almost unbearable level of anxiety. In the best possible way, of course! As the parent of a daughter, this tightly-focused horror story really got to me, keeping me on the edge of my seat throughout. This is perhaps ace thriller writer Erica Ferencik’s best book yet!”
– Jeffrey Thomas, author of Punktown