There is so much about Root Rot that should have made this an instant favorite for me. Weird children, a creepy lake house, bloody mushrooms, bodies and faces doing things they absolutely should not be doing, and an entire story that feels like a nightmare you’re desperately trying to make sense of. And I DID like it. I just think I spent more time trying to understand what the hell was happening than actually getting lost in it.

Nine children are staying with their families at their grandfather’s lake house, and almost immediately, things start feeling wrong. The children don’t really have names. Instead, there’s The Liar, The Crybaby, The Secret Keeper, The One Who Runs Away, and so on. Then they start seeing things they can’t explain, disappearing into the woods, coming back different, and sometimes forgetting that anything strange happened at all.

The atmosphere was easily my favorite part. Everything feels slightly off from the beginning, and that wrongness just keeps growing. The nature horror especially worked for me. Mushrooms, trees, bodies, and the land itself all start blending together in these really gross and beautiful ways.

I also liked the idea behind the way the story is told. The collective “we” narration makes the children feel almost like one organism experiencing everything together, which fits really well with what the book is doing with family, identity, and transformation.

But it also made the story harder for me to connect with.

There are nine children, most are referred to by titles instead of names, reality is constantly shifting, and the narration intentionally keeps you disoriented. Eventually I was spending too much energy trying to remember who was who and what had actually happened to each of them. I understand why the book feels fragmented and dreamlike, but sometimes I wanted something a little more solid to hold onto.

And I think that’s ultimately where I landed with Root Rot. I loved individual pieces of it more than I loved the entire thing. There are images and ideas in here that are going to stick with me, and I genuinely appreciate how fucking weird Saskia Nislow was willing to make it. I just wanted all of those pieces to come together in a way that hit me harder.