Growing Uncertainty: A Review of Growing Things by Paul Tremblay

Growing Things and Other Stories (2019)
Written by: Paul Tremblay
Genre: Horror
Pages: 352 (Hardcover)
Publisher: William Morrow

Why I Chose It: I really enjoyed both Disappearance at Devil’s Rock and A Head Full of Ghosts.  I thought this short story collection was bound to be interesting/creepy/provocative.  And my library had it. Love my public library!!!

The premise:

A masterful anthology featuring nineteen pieces of short fiction, Growing Things is an exciting glimpse into Paul Tremblay’s fantastically fertile imagination.

In “The Teacher,” a Bram Stoker Award nominee for best short story, a student is forced to watch a disturbing video that will haunt and torment her and her classmates’ lives.

Four men rob a pawn shop at gunpoint only to vanish, one-by-one, as they speed away from the crime scene in “The Getaway.”

In “Swim Wants to Know If It’s as Bad as Swim Thinks,” a meth addict kidnaps her daughter from her estranged mother as their town is terrorized by a giant monster . . . or not.

Joining these haunting works are stories linked to Tremblay’s previous novels. The tour de force metafictional novella “Notes from the Dog Walkers” deconstructs horror and publishing, possibly bringing in a character from A Head Full of Ghosts, all while serving as a prequel to Disappearance at Devil’s Rock. “The Thirteenth Temple” follows another character from A Head Full of Ghosts — Merry, who has published a tell-all memoir written years after the events of the novel. And the title story, “Growing Things,” a shivery tale loosely shared between the sisters in A Head Full of Ghosts, is told here in full.

From global catastrophe to the demons inside our heads, Tremblay illuminates our primal fears and darkest dreams in startlingly original fiction that leaves us unmoored. As he lowers the sky and yanks the ground from beneath our feet, we are compelled to contemplate the darkness inside our own hearts and minds.

Spoilers below.

Discussion: Going in to this collection, I knew Tremblay had certain strengths as a writer: excellent characterization, good writing, and the ability to pitchfork us into a scary-things-gone-wrong scenario in a very few words.  So I expected to really be blown away by this collection. I actually approached it with a little bit of dread, because for me, horror short stories are often so much more intense than horror novels.

I was… weirdly disappointed.  Out of 18 stories, I really only loved six. And two were DNFs.

His characters are great, as usual.  His writing is good, and in some places, a little experimental, and the situations were all tense from the get-go.  So why did I get so “meh” about it?

I feel like ambiguity is not really a writer’s friend. It’s fun to write, but as a reader, it’s tricky to navigate.

For me, reading ambiguous horror is a lot like having a low-key anxiety attack. You don’t really know why it’s happening, and when it’s done, nothing much has changed and you sure didn’t learn anything from it. Tremblay gives us four apocalyptic-style stories with… no endings, no causes, no details.  One story of this type might have been interesting, but four gets to be kind of an irritating blank in my brain.

There’s the titular “Growing Things,” in which sisters Merry and Marjorie are trapped in a house that’s being slowly overrun by predatory plant life, while their father runs mad and their mother has vanished. This story bugged me because it came from A Head Full of Ghosts, where the sisters tell each other stories.  But if the sisters exist in A Head Full of Ghosts, then this is nothing but a fairy tale to scare each other and isn’t actually a story of its own. Nothing here matters, because it’s a temporary escape from the “reality” of A Head Full of Ghosts. A story within a story means it has no real stakes. The plants could tear down the house around them and it wouldn’t matter, because the “real” Merry and Marjorie aren’t actually threatened. That made it impossible to care about the outcome of “Growing Things.”

There’s “SWIM Wants to Know if it’s as Bad as SWIM Thinks,” which falls into that irksome category of “random apocalypse or delusional psychosis, you decide!” Give me the story of a lapsed meth addict trying to save her daughter from a Kaiju scenario, and that’s interesting. Give me the story of a lapsed meth addict kidnapping her daughter from her grandmother and thinking she’s doing it because the world is being attacked by Kaiju, and that could be interesting, too. Refuse to commit to either of those? I’m annoyed.

I like unreliable narrators, but I don’t like feeling like the author is smirking at me and saying: “So what do you think actually happened??? Madness or monsters! You be the judge!” I don’t want to be the judge. I want to be told a story. I don’t mind working for deeper meaning. But I don’t want to be stuck on trying to figure out “is this real or not? Is the top spinning or falling?” Some people really enjoy digging into the ambiguity, seeking out fragments of story to prove or disprove their ending, but I am not one of them. I mostly find that sort of thing dull. If it were just one story that Tremblay presented this way, I wouldn’t be annoyed, but there are multiple stories here that seem deliberately ambiguous.

“Where We All Will Be” is a clear enough story, but just didn’t grab me.  A neurodivergent young man is the only one in his entire city who is not mindlessly drawn to an inexplicable sound that pulls people away from their lives. It’s another apocalypse without cause, an excuse for Tremblay to explore a personality in extremis. But here, that exploration falls flat, because I found it impossible to believe that their son was the only one who was unaffected by the results. In a whole city, there’s only one boy who is resistant to the sound? There are no deaf people?

“It’s Against the Law to Feed the Ducks” presents an even more ambiguous catastrophe. A family on vacation finds the world changing around them. By this point, I’m sick of it. I can’t even tell if this catastrophe is geopolitical, economic, or a pandemic. The point-of-view character in this story helps not at all since he is a small child and his parents are attempting to pretend everything is normal. There’s no chance of figuring out what’s happened.  I suppose it should be touching, the family quietly planning ways to stay together even as everything has changed (somehow), but again, I didn’t care.

I especially wanted more concrete endings. A lot of these stories in this collection present a compelling situation only to retreat at the end, requiring the reader to fill in the blanks as to what they think will happen. The problem with that for me is: if the situation is familiar enough to let the reader fill it in, it’s not that interesting, and if the situation is original and peculiar, the ending can be impossible to fill in because we just don’t have enough clues. Sometimes this was okay; sometimes it was tiresome. Rarely was it evocative or thought-provoking.

Where the weird ending did work for me was in the peculiar and twisty “Something About Birds.” A young would-be writer scores an interview with a famous and reclusive writer who wrote a remarkable book. He gets invited to a peculiar party and even more strange and disturbing things ensue. The ending there is painfully abrupt, to the point where I turned the page a couple times just to make sure I hadn’t missed something, but nope! On the other hand, after my irritation eased, the story had given me enough clues to play with a couple possibilities for meaning. Because the young writer has spent pages analyzing his hero’s writing, we’re seeded with potential understanding. The horror in this story is specific to this tale and it makes it scarier than any of the vague apocalypses.

Likewise, “The Teacher” worked even though the ending was utterly up in the air. It’s an unpleasant story about a teacher who deliberately sets out to tear his students down via experiments and cruel concepts. It takes average kids and warps them into a pack, then isolates one of them. There’s a lot of meat on these bones. Here the ambiguous ending works because it fits nicely into the theme of nature vs. nurture: he’s spent an entire semester trying to change their senses of selves, and whether or not he’s succeeded is almost beside the point.

Something that really did work for me in this collection was the running sense of contagion, of uncontrolled growth. But it’s also a subtler theme in three of my favorite stories.

“_______” was a real stand-out for me despite 1) ambiguity and 2) an unclear ending.  This story even has an unclear beginning! But this short really works because while the mechanisms of the horror aspect are unclear, the rest is sharply drawn. On a nice day at the beach with his children, a father realizes something is horribly wrong about the woman claiming to be his wife. He struggles for understanding; he struggles for escape, and is utterly powerless. For me, there’s this immense sense of dangerous contagion here. I didn’t mind mulling this one over, trying to put together the pieces into an explicable shape.

“It Won’t Go Away” is a fun sort of story about writers going mad, serially. A pair of writers give readings, one a regular type of reading, one horribly not, and ripples begin spreading outward. While the premise is familiar, the twists this short piece takes are not. I liked it a lot. I can’t explain why it fits the contagion theme without spoilers so… just trust me. It’s there.

“Notes for The Barn from the Wild” is an old-fashioned Lovecraftian kind of horror story mixed with a touch of adventure, and it’s layered. A lone narrator goes to investigate the mysterious death of another loner, finds a strange book, and gets caught up in the same madness that killed the first man. There are historical secrets and demons and blasphemous theaters. It’s all very enjoyable horror, and like a Lovecraft story, it includes the Unseen and the Unknowable infecting everyone who investigates.

Other stories I thought worth the price of admission, so to speak:

“A Haunted House Is A Wheel Upon Which Some Are Broken” was another winner for me, despite not really being the usual type of horror. There are no monsters here, no bloody attacks, no jump scares.  There aren’t even any really traumatic secrets. It’s primarily about looking back on a part of your life you’d thought you were done with. I thought it was very affecting, a meditation on guilt and loss. Oh, it’s also a nod to Choose Your Own Adventure books, asking you to choose which room of the house you enter next at the end of each page. I can’t imagine how it would work on an e-reader so I was glad to have a physical copy on hand.

“The Getaway” —  I’d read this before in the excellent Supernatural Noir, ed. by Ellen Datlow. I liked it then, and I liked it now. It’s a fairly straightforward crime story about a group of low-class thugs attacking a man in a pawn shop, then fleeing.  Except… the order of events might be just a little off. Four men leap into the car after a shootout, but how many will be left at the end of the ride? Enjoyable.

In conclusion: Overall, I’m not mad I read this collection. I think Tremblay’s writing on its own made it worth the read. He excels at characters and deceptively clean prose that turns powerful. I think if you’re a fan of Tremblay’s, this is a must-read. I just don’t think it’s necessarily a keeper. A big thank you for my local library getting this one in stock!