Book Review: ‘They Bloom at Night’ by Trang Thanh Tran

I read Trang Thanh Tran’s first novel, ‘She is a Haunting’, for season six of our podcast, ‘The Dark Academicals’, so I jumped at the chance to read her latest novel, especially when I learned we’d be exploring a flooded, algae-covered Louisiana.

Trang Thanh Tran is a master of weaving together haunting stories of loss and home and threat with themes of generational trauma, what it is to be caught between cultures, and the longing for things you don’t even fully understand and ‘They Bloom at Night’ ticked all of those boxes for me.

I’m a sucker for a Southern Gothic, especially when it combines the aftermath of climate-fuelled disasters that have creepy, body horror, bio aftereffects.

A red algae bloom has taken over Mercy, Louisiana, ever since a hurricane devastated the town. Mutated wildlife lurks in the water that rises by the day, but Mercy has always been a place where monsters walk in plain sight. Especially at its the Cove, where Noon's life was upended long before the storm at a party her older boyfriend insisted on.

Now, Noon is stuck navigating the submerged town with her mom, who believes their dead family has reincarnated as sea creatures. Alone with the pain of what happened that night at the cove, Noon buries the she is not the right shape.

When Mercy's predatory leader demands Noon and her mom capture the creature drowning residents, she reluctantly finds an ally in his deadly hunter of a daughter and friends old and new. As the next storm approaches, Noon must confront the past and decide if it's time to answer the monster itching at her skin.

The set up and setting of ‘They Bloom at Night’ is so captivating in its inherent threat to Noon and her mother, especially as that plays alongside her inability to leave Mercy without abandoning her mom and her obsessive need to find the ghosts of their family. It feels cloying and oppressive, even while they’re out on the open water, because it’s the water that provides a large portion of the threat. The red blooming algae has caused…changes in the wildlife and no one really knows what it’s capable of.

With the looming fear and trauma of an assault at a party and questions about her identity and sexuality added to the daily threats that Noon faces in Mercy, she lives a very risky and fraught life and it was so easy to care for her and hope hope hope that she gets out of the sticky situation she found herself in unscathed. I was so thoroughly swept away by the setting and the way that Noon navigated it with her mother and Covey that I was sad to leave Mercy behind when the book ended. I’m a sucker for a vibrant setting and ‘They Bloom at Night’ nailed it.

Trang Thanh Tran is a beautiful and thought-provoking writer and she’s on her way to becoming an author who’s books that I eagerly anticipate. ‘They Bloom at Night’ is a cloying, oppressive, and tantalising exploration of what lurks beneath the surface, both personally and literally.

Thank you to Bloomsbury YA and NetGalley for the review copy.

Written by Sophie