The best books about the terrifying world of plants

John Wyndham’s book is the perfect example of “plant horror.” I’ve read this book at very different periods in my life, starting when I was a child–and whatever my age, I’ve always loved it. When you first read the opening–a man awakens one morning in a hospital bed, his eyes bandaged, and finds everything around him eerily quiet–you might find it familiar. It’s a scene famously reprised in the film 28 Days Later and in the first episode of The Walking Dead. It’s a brilliant, disquieting scene, and it’s impossible not to read on.

The man in the hospital bed turns out to be one of the few who did not gaze at a marvelous display of comets the night before and, thus, one of the few who has not been struck blind. A gripping narrative follows about the small population of those who can still see trying to survive in post-apocalyptic England. And they must contend not only with crowds of increasingly desperate blind people but with swelling masses of triffids–plants that walk and taste human flesh. The triffids are this novel's stars, demonstrating how humans underestimate, take for granted, ignore, and exploit the plant life around them. 

This book stands out as the most thought-provoking and terrifying plant horror novel. I’m surprised that more people aren’t talking about this novel or Scott Smith (who also wrote A Simple Plan). It follows a group of young tourists in Mexico who decide to leave the beaten track for an “authentic” experience (nearly always a bad idea). They inadvertently end up on a sacred (or cursed?) site–a benign-looking hill covered in vines. After they end up on the hill, the locals won’t let them leave, and neither, it turns out, will the vines. 

This book is a survival story, but it’s also a brilliant exploration of how utterly unable we are, most of the time, to make conscious and rational choices; we act for all sorts of reasons, hardly any of them freely and intentionally chosen. I found myself noting throughout the novel how Smith repeatedly suggests that the characters trapped on the hill may actually not be so different from the vines–especially as those vines seem increasingly and eerily sentient. If I’ve conveyed anything here, I hope it’s that this book is a criminally underrated novel–beautifully written, intelligent, and completely enthralling.

I read Kiernan’s book only recently and found it entrancing. It’s a novel that defies any easy description. In a way, it’s about a grieving writer who takes up residence in an isolated house to try to recover from the death of her partner and to try to start writing again. Nothing more happens except her occasional drives to the local village and walks to the nearby red tree. But the book bursts with richness–with complex storytelling and, we slowly realize, with an increasingly unreliable narrator. As the narrator finds, reads, and transcribes a manuscript of local folklore she found in the house, the novel increasingly blurs the boundaries between past and present, reality and delusion. At times, I found myself unsure of where I was or whose words I was reading. All the stories converge, though, on the red tree, which exerts some force over those that come within its orbit.  

One of my favorite poems is Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Kiernan’s poetic and multi-layered novel could be called “Thirteen Ways of Looking at an Oak Tree.” It’s about how trees shape our lives, figure in history, and weave their way into story and legend. Kiernan explicitly references a whole tradition of writers who have woven the life and lore of trees into their writing, and she includes them all in her final Author’s Note–a helpful concluding reading list. 

I came to Finney’s novel after watching both of the excellent (and, for the most part, faithful) film adaptations (1956 and 1978). Finney’s novel is worth a read for its own sake, not least because an incredibly interesting chapter (13) explicitly weaves race into the narrative that’s absent from both films. Finney’s book represents (rather literally) how we tend to see plant life–when we think about it at all–as alien.

Cue alien seed pods that end up on Earth and begin to proliferate wildly–another deep-seated fear we have about vegetation–that they’ll spread and take over. The seed pods colonize humans, rendering them indifferent and emotionless–exactly the view we’ve always had of plant life, symbol par excellence of encroaching impersonality.

After watching (more than once) the famous 1956 film adaptation, I started Finney’s novel primed to think about the conflict between communism and American individualism. But the novel is actually very much invested in imagining humans being taken over by a kind of “plant-thinking”–in imagining what that would look like. 

Marder’s book is a brilliant exploration of plants in a philosophical (not a botanical) sense. It’s one of the most eye-opening (and accessible) philosophy books I’ve ever read, illuminating a swathe of life on Earth I honestly had never thought much about before.

Marder writes clearly and cogently about how we’ve thought about plants and how we’ve been wrong: we’ve been blind to plants; we’ve shaped them as our absolute opposite; we’ve treated them only instrumentally, exploiting them for what they can do for us. And then he makes a real effort to think through what plants are–what vegetal being actually is. One of the most mind-blowing things, he argues, in my view, is that we are much closer to plants than we think–we have our own buried “vegetal being.”

Marder’s elaboration of plant life–and how we’ve misunderstood and abused it–is literally the theoretical scaffold of all fiction and film about plants and their horrors. They undo us, he argues, along with all our systems of being and thinking. When he writes that plant life demonstrates “the insatiable desire to appropriate the other, to grow in force,” he expresses what lies behind all the horror fiction that portrays plants as swarming, massing, and taking us over.