A twisted, tangled story about workplace love-affairs, and plants with a taste for human flesh

During a grocery run to her local shopping center, Shell Pine sees a ‘HELP NEEDED’ sign in a flower shop window. She’s just left her fiancé, lost her job, and moved home to her parents’ house. She has to make a change and bring some good into her life, so she goes inside and takes a chance. Shell realizes right away that flowers are just the good thing she’s been looking for, as is Neve, the beautiful florist who wrote the sign asking for help. The thing is, Neve needs help more than Shell could possibly imagine.

An orchid growing out of sight in the heart of the mall is watching them closely. His name is Baby, and the beautiful florist belongs to him. He’s young, he’s hungry, and he’ll do just about anything to make sure he can keep growing big and strong. Nothing he eats – nobody he eats – can satisfy him, except the thing he most desires. Neve. He adores her and wants to consume her, and will stop at nothing to eat the one he loves.

This is a story about possession, and monstrosity, and working retail. It is about hunger and desire, and other terrible things that grow.

I received an advance galley of this book courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley. All thoughts are my own.

This was a strange, but interesting read that managed to balance a haunting, creeping dread with tender moments of love, friendship, and quiet desperation. At its core, the novel is a sort of retelling of “Little Shop of Horrors”, but with a fresh, Sapphic twist and a setting that’s equal parts nostalgic and nightmarish: a dying shopping mall. Think Audrey II meets the Upside Down from “Stranger Things”, but with a distinctly queer, feminist bent.

The story follows Shell Pine, a woman who is going through a lot of (maybe too much) change – she’s left her fiancé, lost her job, and is back home with her parents. Shell used to have a purpose and direction in life, and now she’s kind of floundering. During a trip to a shopping center, she sees a “HELP NEEDED” sign in the window of a flower shop and decides to enter the shop to see what sort of help the owner needs. Shell has never worked with flowers before, but she’s desperate for connection and open to learning something new. There, she meets Neve, the enigmatic florist who quickly becomes something more than a boss or a coworker. Their connection is immediate and electric – but there’s a catch. The shop isn’t just a quaint place to sell daisies and daffodils. Hidden in the shadows of the mall, there’s an orchid named Baby. He’s sentient. He’s ravenous. And he’s in love with Neve – so much so that he wants to eat her and make her part of him.

Griffin’s writing is lyrical, surreal, and sometimes dizzying in its intensity. The prose pulses with hunger and yearning, and while it takes a few chapters to adjust to the frequent shifts in perspective (especially with no clear signposting), it eventually becomes clear that this disorientation is intentional. Baby’s influence seeps through everything, and the lack of traditional structure mirrors how he infects and distorts the lives of those around him.

The book is filled with atmosphere, and the setting is one of the book’s standout features. The mall itself feels like a character: decaying, haunted by memories of a consumerist past, and slowly being consumed by something older and far more dangerous. There’s a creeping dread throughout the novel, as if something is rotting beneath the surface, and I loved it.

Despite the horror elements, there’s a strong emotional core to the story. The relationships – especially between Shell and Neve – are complex and deeply human. There’s a permeating feeling of need throughout the book that I found very effective. I also found the ending to be deeply satisfying. It doesn’t offer neat resolutions, but it does leave you with a lingering unease and a sense that things – while different – aren’t necessarily going to be okay.

That said, the pacing does falter at times. The middle section drags a bit, focusing on the day-to-day dynamics of the mall workers in a way that, while interesting, occasionally feels like filler. The friendships and relationships are lovely, but the novel might have benefited from a bit more pruning – especially when it comes to building the stakes. With a monstrous plant on the loose, one almost wishes a few of these characters had met a grisly end to heighten the tension and drama of the overall book. It also would have added to the sense of dread and elevated the horror element.

In short, I found this to be a gorgeously written novel about hunger, love, and monstrosity – and how, sometimes, the things that feed us are also the things that devour us. I would definitely recommend this to fans of queer horror. While I felt it dragged a bit in places, I still enjoyed it. It’s different, and not particularly scary, but it is beautifully written and worth checking out.