They Bloom at Night
by Trang Thanh Tran
High School    Bloomsbury    272 pp.
3/25    9781547611119    $19.99
e-book ed.  9781547611126    $13.99

In the wake of a hurricane, a strange red algal bloom has taken over the waters of Mercy, Louisiana, where Noon ekes out a life capturing mutant sea creatures and trading them to the crooked harbormaster. As people go missing, rumors of a monster emerge, and Noon must hunt down the monster for the harbormaster or risk losing everything. The mission forces Noon to team up with the harbormaster’s daughter to probe the mysteries haunting the town, all the while threatening to expose the monstrous things inside our own protagonist. Tran (She Is a Haunting) makes deft use of horror genre conventions to construct a narrative about how trauma shapes and changes people. The atmospheric, immersive descriptions of the setting underscore the vital symbiotic relationship between human and nature that gets ignored in the pursuit of capitalistic extraction. Noon’s narrative perspective encourages identification with the shadowy Other of the monster. As a child of Vietnamese refugees, a queer person who feels out of place in their body (the occasional pronouns used in the first-person narration shift from she/her to they/them), and a survivor of sexual violence, Noon knows what it means to suffocate under the pressure of oppressive norms that seek to punish their self-expression and neutralize its subversive potential. Freeing the monster in themself means confronting their traumatic past and embracing their own power of unsettling.

From the March/April 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.