Still Growing

The house as organism is the most compelling element. The tendrils extending from Patrice's body through the mattress, into the walls, along the ceiling — this is not decoration but a genuine architectural horror. The moment Eva realizes the tendrils are her sister's nervous system extended into the structure reframes the entire domestic space. To cut them is to cut Patrice. The house becomes prosthetic body; the body becomes structural element. The porch pulling from the foundation, the cracked window, the failing plumbing — these aren't parallel metaphors, they're part of the same system of collapse and regrowth. I found the spatial logic rigorous and unsettling. The chair with the tendril growing along its armrest that Eva permits to stay because removing it would mean leaving the room — that's a perfect small horror.

76 found this helpful

Competent piece with strong domestic grounding, but I've read this emotional territory handled with more daring. The matter-of-fact tone toward the grotesque works well — the green residue in the bathtub that Eva stops trying to scrub, the biopsies that grow back as bark. The class detail is specific and earned, not slumming. But the structure, for all its chronological shuffling, still delivers a fairly linear emotional trajectory: shock becomes routine becomes acceptance. The recognition scene where Patrice briefly surfaces is the obvious emotional peak and the story knows it and frames it carefully and that careful framing is exactly what costs it surprise. The Reggie phone call and visit are the sharpest writing here — contempt rendered as banality.

72 found this helpful

Not a ghost story, and not really my territory, but I can recognise solid construction when I see it. The shuffled chronology keeps the reader slightly off-balance without descending into gimmickry. What works best is the domestic detail — the Montgomery Ward water heater from 1987, the Garth Brooks T-shirt, the tuna casserole that was never good. These aren't decorative; they ground the impossible in a specific poverty that makes the horror feel inevitable rather than fantastical. The brother Reggie is drawn in about four sentences and I despised him immediately, which is efficient. A bit long for what it delivers, though. The flowering section could have been cut entirely.

64 found this helpful

The non-linear structure does real work here — it mirrors the caretaker's experience of time collapsing under routine. The bath scenes accumulate weight through repetition rather than escalation. What impressed me most was the restraint: the moment when Eva crosses out 'Patrice' and writes 'Patient' and then crosses out 'Patient' and writes 'Patrice' again — that tiny oscillation contains the entire emotional architecture of the piece. The prose is precise without being cold. 'A small wrong thing in a world where wrong things were plentiful and mostly survivable' — that sentence carries the whole register.

62 found this helpful

The fragmented chronology is the story's most intelligent choice. By opening with a bath — routine caregiving, clinical notation — and then pulling us backward through the timeline, the piece denies us the standard transformation narrative arc. We never experience the shock of first discovery in real time; instead we get the lived reality of someone who has already metabolized that shock into procedure. The composition book functions almost like a camera in a Haneke film — it observes without interpreting. The flowering scene risks beauty, and the story knows it risks beauty, and Eva's retreat to the kitchen counter is the correction. I wanted slightly more from the final section. The ending lands on ambiguity, which is right, but the rain metaphor felt a half-step too tidy for work this disciplined.

59 found this helpful

Gave this to my book club and it wrecked the room. The recognition scene — where Patrice laughs her real laugh and is fully herself for five seconds before fogging over again — had two people in actual tears. Body horror that makes you cry instead of cringe is rare and this earns it. The detail about separating the laundry and then feeling guilty about separating the laundry is so specific and true to the caretaker experience. Not perfect — I think some of the middle sections repeat the same emotional beat — but the ending with Eva picking up the washcloth because she'll need it in an hour is exactly the right note. No resolution. Just the next task.

58 found this helpful

Body horror that's more body than horror. The transformation stuff is solid — bark growing out of skin, roots going into the mattress, that scream when Eva tries to cut the tendrils. That all lands. But man, there's a lot of washing dishes and making soup and paying bills between the good parts. I get it, the mundane stuff is the point or whatever, but I kept waiting for something to actually happen and it never does. The brother showing up and being useless was the most realistic part. Decent but slow.

50 found this helpful

This is a story about what happens when the safety net doesn't exist. The real horror isn't the transformation — it's the disability paperwork that takes three months, the landlord who won't replace the water heater, the brother in Spokane who sends $500 once and disappears, the family medical leave denied because a sister doesn't count. Eva can't call the CDC because institutions don't help people like Patrice — they study them. That line about the specialist writing a paper about her while recommending 'monitoring' is devastating. The house itself becomes a body: the porch pulling from the foundation, the cracked window, the plumbing that clangs. Everything decays together. Everything is held together by one woman who quit her job and drives for DoorDash while her sister becomes a garden. I don't think I've read anything that captures the economics of caregiving with this much clarity.

50 found this helpful

Thirty years of horror novels and I still know a good one when it gets under my skin without a single jump scare. This one sits with you. The bath routine, the composition books from Dollar General filled front and back, Eva eating soup standing up because the kitchen chair has a tendril on it and she's stopped fighting it — that's where the dread lives. Not in the transformation but in the accommodation. As a nurse I've seen that accommodation in real life, the way caregivers just absorb each new impossible thing into their routine. The Patrice/Patient back-and-forth in the notebook nearly got me.

34 found this helpful