A big family divided between adults and children visits their grandfather’s house. The kids, being cousins and siblings of different ages, try to get along and explore the surroundings. Everything seems to be going well and everyone’s enjoying themselves. Until they aren’t. Faces start to look weird, strange shadows and sounds start to appear, time feels different than it’s supposed to, and for some reason everyone is acting really weird.

~~~

A quick read that turns very dark fast. A little off putting that no one had actual names (The Oldest, The Baby, The Boy Twin, The Liar, The One Who Runs Away, etc.). But you get used to it at some point. Some scenes are actually terrifying. Like the one with the feet turned around backwards, or the animals literally eating The Secret Keeper (who willingly gave them her eyes, teeth, tongue , hair, and literally her entire body.

Overall I gave this 3.5 starts rounded up to 4!
A quick body horror/ nature horror read

It felt like being at a family lunch, sitting at the kids' table chatting with cousins about scary stories until weird things start happening.
I loved it.
I would definitely reread it

I was so excited for Root Rot but I just don't think it really landed for me.

This is about a group of young cousins staying at their grandfathers lakehouse and the weird/creepy things that occur there. The characters aren't given names but instead are referred to as "The Liar," "The Crybaby," "The Twin," etc. I liked this concept but there were too many characters for that to work for me. I think this whole book is supposed to feel fever dreamy which that contributes to, but too much of my energy was spent trying to figure out who was who and what had happened to which character and it took me out of the experience.

Some of the horror scenes in isolation were AMAZING. I love plant/mushroom/nature body horror and Nislow does that immaculately. It was simultaneously beautiful and horrifying which is truly difficult to execute. For me, these scenes/elements where great on their own but didn't really amount to anything impactful as a whole.

If you are someone who appreciates vibes & atmosphere > characters & plot, this might be for you!

*Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the free digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

this is some of my favourite horror description i’ve ever read it absolutely nailed the ghastly, morbid energy.

brilliantly and earth-shatteringly grotesque, this book explores toxic familial bonds in a way i haven’t seen tackled in horror for a very long time. the collective “we” of the children employs a delightfully eerie element to this fever dream of a narrative.

This unsettling novella chronicles the journey of nine children from the same family who travel to their Grandfather’s vacation home by The Lake. At first, all of the siblings and cousins are having fun playing, roaming the house and the surrounding woods. Told in the collective “we” of the children, strange things begin to happen to them as they come across the spores of mushrooms in the woods. The children begin to change, their perceptions of one another warping along with their sense of time and space. Dopplegangers grow up from the ground, mushrooms leaking blood. One of the girls, The Liar, is forced to confront the fearful change overtaking the others, and to choose whether to resist or submit to what is happening to them. The way this book warps the boundaries between family, home and the body is fantastically eerie!

This was definitely a creepy read, and some of the scenes were so well written and unnerving however it wasnt quite what I expected.

I understand that the lack of names was part of it all but it made it difficult to keep track.

The book also felt disjointed at times and bot in a way that made the story better.

It has a lot of potential and is definitely a great premise for a horror.

Thanks to NetGalley and Creature Publishing for providing me with this arc

I read 50 pages in one sitting and loved it, there's this hive mind presented by our protagonist(s) which is unnerving and comforting at the same time. There's a familiarity in the depth that they know each other but the lack of names keeps you on edge in an unnerving and spooky atmosphere.
Following the first chunk, I slept, went to work and was thinking about it all day, until I could finish work and continue the story.

Some of the classic horror images will haunt me from this book, it plays on the tropes but in a sophisticated and understated way, which allows for suspense to build and i found myself genuinely squirming and 'eeking' throughout it.

This book is a confusing, alluring spiral into the stars, into the earth and keeps you guessing. It's open ended, it's alarming but overall it's a gripping mystery which i LOVED.

This is such a strange novella in the best of ways. I think it encapsulates a lot of what people think of when they consider fungal horror. The whole book feels like a hallucination; everything has a hazy quality, like something is hovering in your peripheral vision.

The downside was that the large cast of characters, alongside the decision not to name characters in the traditional sense. These choices meant it was easy to get confused and pulled out of the story, particularly in the beginning.

But overall, this is near the top of my recommendations when it comes to mushrooms and horror.

This is a very strange little book that shows a lot of promise but was ultimately not the most satisfying read.

Each narrator is a "type" and doesn't have a name: The One Who Lies, The Crybaby, The Male Twin, etc. This has an interesting distancing effect but also made it very difficult for me to keep a handle on who was doing what. I'm sure this is the point: the children are a collective with few distinguishing features, but this makes it difficult for character development, especially when there's a cast of so many.

There are some very chilling scenes in this book - a combination of fungal horror and ultimately cosmic horror. Nothing is ever really explained either. I particularly enjoyed that the adults in this novel - who normally have a responsibility to protect the vulnerable children - are either absent or complicit in the horrors.

I'm very interested to see what Saskia Nislow writes next.

This was a strange, unnerving book that certainly packed a punch when it came to atmosphere, but perhaps ended up being a bit too surreal for me. I found that, even though I really enjoyed the writing style, I couldn’t fully engage with this book as I couldn’t get a grip on what was going on. I know that was presumably intentional, but it did stop me from truly connecting with the narrative and characters. Moreover, I thought the naming conventions used for the characters was interesting, but again, didn’t help when it came to the confusion I was experiencing. I think if this were a short story in a collection I would have enjoyed it more, but as a stand alone novella it was a slightly bewildering reading experience. I would still recommend this for the prose alone, and if you’re a fan of surreal horror.

3,5 stars rounded upward for Netgalley.

Root Rot is a story about family, but not in the way that you think. It was not completely what I expected, but honestly, I was not sure what I exactly expected. The whole book felt like a fever dream, though I did find it somewhat predictable at some points. Relatively early in the book I figured out what was happening. Not that this was a bad thing, as this didn't take away from the overall story. Though, personally, I would have liked for it to be a little less predictable at times.

The writing style is not everyone's cup of tea. It almost feels as if you're reading a poem and the weird POV feels off at the start. Of course, it made sense when the book came to an end, and that was something that I really liked about it. The story was flowing pretty well, giving me the vibe of a modern gothic story.

Creepy, weird and dream-like stories are completely my thing. And if you enjoy things like that as well, Root Rot might be the book for you!

The naming conventions were different, but I think I liked them. It took me a little longer than it should have to get through, but overall I enjoyed it.

This is a fascinating novella that uses an intentionally obscuring naming convention to shape your perspective of the comings and goings of the characters throughout. At first, it feels a touch gimmicky, but it succeeds in the story's ultimate payoff.

Root Rot is modern cosmic horror done so very right. I can't say that it will be for everyone (and truth be told, the structure--for me--made the process of completing it far longer than it should have), but when it hooks its sharps into you, it will leave your skin crawling.

This is a really hard book to review. But let me start with 2 important points. 1 - I received a copy to review from NetGalley. 2 - I have dyslexia and I feel it affected my ability to really enjoy this story unfortunately (and it’s a shame I have to disclose this in my review but I feel it’s critical to my experience).

This book is an abstract and dense novella. It’s full of complexity with unrealistic narrators, shifts in tones, pronouns and thoughts and the strange events that happen feel like you are slapped in the middle of something. It’s really felt at the end of the book but don’t expect a clear beginning or end (the story def takes places in the middle of some type of event)?

I can appreciate the fact the characters have no real names and are reduced to attributes that people tend to generalize and hyper focus on. Usually something people get tired of hearing. Maybe even something fake. Our nine characters are children on top of being reduced to just an attribute; they struggle with understanding what’s happening so we also struggle with them.

I’m guessing the lack of quotes and formal writing style is intentional I kept trying to understand if it was a hive mind thing or if people were a actually conversing but the choice to italicize and maybe enlarge these parts made it so hard for me to actually read (more on this later).

The spore horror was very interesting but I still can’t tell you the (dare I say) root cause of the infection/invasion / parallel universe / hive hallucinating / insert the correct answer. And this is troubling for readers like me. I enjoy strong character development and this book gets a -5 in that department. As intentional as it is and I understand the meaning behind it, it still was a struggle to not disengage from what was happening. I ended up believing it didn’t matter who was who or what happened to which person and you could swap them out for any other character being intentional to the point of the story but that’s why I don’t get. I couldn’t tell you what this was a metaphor for.

So no character development, hard to follow metaphors and symbolism that was all abstract. And convoluted action scenes where even the characters don’t know what’s happening. I just wish we didn’t have all this competing with each other in my brain as I’m trying my best to read it. Because I abhorred this writing style. It was too wordy and boring. It took for ever to read a few lines as it’s all a jumbled mess of run on sentences. Or sentences that were just too long. I struggled remembering what I read. And I struggled connecting the words. It felt like a textbook to me in the sense that sometimes you just can’t make the content click. And I know again this was intentionally written like this is not like it’s bad writing or editing.

And this ties into the problem I had. With verbose and incredibly long sentence I struggled to make the words mean anything. I tried to read aloud even but I couldn’t get the flow and it was like reading flash cards.

I struggled with the lack of any Chapters and only have the little • for line breaks into a new section. I struggled with the fonts and I kept trying to find a size and background and brightness that calmed my dyslexia.

With so many words in a section I absolutely couldn’t read on my phone. My brain couldn’t handle seeing so many words without a pause to catch my mental breath. Then on my iPad, it was really bad too since the author didn’t use quotations which is an important feature my brain relies on to help with pacing and understanding context. The choice to italicize the word and make them slightly large then triggered other problems for me to read left to right. My eyes could not focus on one sentence at a time. I was overwhelmed by all the words and then I kept getting lost. Completely lost to where I had to restart from the top of the page or even go back a page or two to try it all again. I felt the page sounded new like I didn’t even read anything on it. It was slightly gaslighting me I think. (Me the book, the app).

I ended up having to use my hands to block off all the text below I was reading so I didn’t have anxiety over all the words and also helped me from getting lost but the change in font made me get sick feeling after a while. It took me so long to read such a short book!

I felt pathetic crying over a silly book because all I wanted to do was feel like a normal person and just be able to read it and here I am trying to find the cheat code to unlock my brains ability to let me read.

I don’t normally have such a horrible time reading prose and getting so lost as my dyslexia symptoms with reading are pretty manageable. it’s been while it was so bad I couldn’t barely read it at all. It’s been ages I felt so stupid and ashamed of my reading disability.

It took me a while to realize it was triggering my dyslexia too since I read all the time (120 books this year). If I had known I wouldn’t have requested the book as it’s not written to accommodate my disability. I hope other people who also live with neurodivergent brains have better luck with this book.

Had it been formatted differently would I have enjoyed it? Who knows. The long sentences still could have short circuited my thought patterns. It didn’t feel worth my embarrassment and effort for the story. I hated hated hated whatever happened to the Liar because it didn’t follow the rest of the things I thought I read and now I feel like I real missed key plot points early on having so much trouble with reading this book.

I definitely cannot recommend this book with the fear it’s not disability friendly for others like me and because I would be embarrassed to try to talk about it with others. it was so abstract I couldn’t connect with the story and it would show 🥲😅

Publishing date: 25.03.2025 (DD/MM/YYYY)
Thank you to NetGalley and Creature Publishing for the ARC. My opinions are my own.

DNF at 53%

Root Rot had the exact premise I like reading about. A group of people in a hopeless situation, some kind of fungus or rot you can't really stop, and woodsy uncanny horror. But it just didn't work for me.

My biggest hurdle when reading was the character names or "titles". I found it hard to keep track of who was who and really imagining the different scenes in my head. It quickly turned into a headache. To clarify, no one has names, but instead titles like:
"The liar"
"The one with the Beautiful voice"
"The baby"
And this goes for everyone. I think it could work if the characters had more characteristics that weren't just personalities and if they were introduced slower and more spaced out.

And my other problem is that I didn't find the plot interesting, sadly. It just didn't grip me like I wanted it to.

This was a miss. With what I read I am giving this 2 stars.

This book was weird—the kind of weird that makes you feel like you’re slipping into psychosis right along with the story. It’s a short read, but I kept flipping back and forth, second-guessing what I’d just read. Nothing is straightforward, and even the characters don’t have real names—just labels like “the one who runs away,” “the liar,” or “the girl twin.”

Told from the collective perspective of a group of kids on a family trip to a lake house, the story blends body horror with psychological horror in a way that’s totally disorienting but incredibly compelling. It felt like falling into a dream you’re not sure you want to wake up from.

Definitely one of the most unique reading experiences I’ve had—I’ll be revisiting this one for sure.

Firstly, thank you NetGalley for the eArc of this book. This was right up my alley! The beginning of the book was slow paced, but once it got going...oh baby, was it going! This book was definitely my type of horror. This was the first book I've read by Saskia Nislow, and I was impressed. I think that one of my favorite things about the book was the style in which she choice to write the narrator. I feel like I was never really sure which character was narrating the book or if was a different entity all together. I also loved how unreliable the characters were. All of them just unreliable kids just trying to fit in with their family. I like that none of the characters explicitly had names either...The Liar, The Secret Keeper, The Crybaby, The Boy Twin. That helped in really making the reader start caring about these characters, but like in their own time. What can I say, I really enjoyed this book. The characters, the setting, the forest entity, the tension...great book. The best soil comes from dead things. <3

I love a botanical horror but I did not love this novella. Mostly how the characters were named really irked me. I don't think it would have bothered me as much as an audio. It made me feel disconnected with the characters and reading their nicknames over and over made the storyline drag in my opinion.

The imagery is really good and creepy though.

Great suspense! Love the visuals given, really draws you into the story. The dynamic between each of the children and the names they have given eachother is such a great part of why I enjoyed this book.