3.5 stars rounded down

I am very on the fence with this one. I loved the writing, and I was really fucking with the eerie killer-plant yearning to consume the florist vibes. Yeah it was a slow build up, but I didn’t mind that because like I say, what I was reading was still incredibly well written and threw in enough creepy vine shit for me to give a side eye every now and then!

Now, I have two big complaints. Firstly, the body horror that we got was FUN and I needed way more of it for the slow build up to be worth it. Secondly, I felt like I had a way clearer idea in my head of who the supporting characters were than our main gals Neve and Shell. Both of these issues frustrated me because it showed me that Griffin *could* do the gory scenes and character development I wanted, but just didn’t deliver in the right areas.

All in all I’d still recommend this is a solid read, but it’s definitely more ‘weird fiction’ than ‘botanical horror’.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to review an ARC of this title.

A delicious little story about desire, dreams, decay - and working retail at the end of the world. This is my first book by Irish novelist Sarah Maria Griffin and I had a lot of fun with it!

Shell, newly single and back living with her family, is drifting until she stumbles upon a florist’s job in a failing shopping mall that’s on the brink of closure. The role not only offers her purpose, but also brings her into the orbit of her enigmatic boss Neve, whose charm quickly sparks attraction. Through Neve, Shell finds herself drawn into a circle of fellow shop workers, each clinging to this decaying mall while navigating their own personal crises.

But Neve has a secret. Hidden in the florist’s back room is a plant that is far from ordinary — sentient, ever-growing, and hungry for blood.
Griffin uses this strange premise to full effect. The mall is a brilliant setting: overgrown, collapsing, and haunted by the ghosts of consumerism past. The relationships between the characters feel authentic yet precarious, each of them relying on one another as outsiders in both their work and personal lives. This theme of mutual dependence threads through the novel, most strikingly in the relationship between Neve and her monstrous plant, and between Shell and Neve themselves. This tangled interdependency is reflected through the novel’s structure as we see things from Shell’s perspective as well as from Neves, the plant, and Neve’s ex.

Eat the Ones You Love is a light-touch exploration of monstrosity and cannibalism (a theme that many contemporary women horror writers are currently reimagining), but what makes it hit harder is the way it captures young people navigating economic precarity and social decay, forging uneasy alliances just to get by.

Entertaining and strangely tender, Griffin’s novel is a fresh and engaging take on organic-based horror fiction.

why is it the gorgeous covers that fail to live up to the expectations?!!! I reallllly was buzzing for this book but I found myself realllly bored to be honest. Initially I was quite hooked, but something in the execution did not continue to keep me on the page :(
It is one of them where it may be a me issue....
DNF-ed it about halfway. :(

Thank you to NetGalley and Publishers for this ARC.

Loved this book! It was very unsettling, the ‘narrator’ brought a fun way to immerse yourself into the story.

Eat the Ones You Love promised dark, feral fiction, and was my most highly anticipated read of the year but it left me a little cold. I found the plant narrator dynamic, impossible to connect with. It felt like someone had put Baby in the corner, and it was now giving serious incel energy, which I couldn't shake. I struggled to finish this one, and if it had not been an ARC gifted to my by Netgalley and the publisher, I may have cut and run with an early DNF. I am honestly so disappointed that I didn't love it, but it just did not land with me.

Thank you for the opportunity to read an advance copy, all opinions are my own.

Comparisons with Little Shop of Horrors are inevitable, but I fully enjoyed this novel.

Reeling from a break-up and losing her job in graphic design, Shell bounces hard back to living with her parents and cuts herself off from her well-to-do peer group. She applies for a job as a florist's assistant at the local struggling shopping centre and immediately becomes infatuated with her new boss, Neve. What Shell doesn't know is that a sinister orchid has already got its hooks into Neve and has its own mysterious needs and motives.

The build=up in this novel is great, especially chapters written from the omniscient POV of the orchid and the increasingly troubled letters from Neve's ex-girlfriend. The ending felt a little rushed and didn't quite pay off the narrative in the way I was hoping it would, but other than that this way a very fun read.

Eat The Ones You Love makes a great companion peace to Feast While You Can by Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta, one of my favourites of 2024. Similar themes of a sapphic will-they-won't-they romance amidst the horror, as well as exploring the feeling of being stuck in your home town and left behind by your peers.

2.5 stars

Eat The Ones You Love is a confusing book because you start it with an expectation but the book doesn’t quite feel like it knows what it wants to be.

There are a few surreal, creepy, intense moments but the word is “some”, mostly it just doesn’t feel like it’s on the page or it is but too mild and vague. Ultimately a book about a sentient parasitic orchid that literally stalks and consumes people doesn’t feel as menacing as it should or as it feels like it’s been marketed. This book doesn’t feel like horror (and no it’s also not Rocky Horror inspired), Shell isn’t particularly interesting a character, she feels relatable to start but just really goes nowhere, Neve is the character I wanted to know more and was left wanting. If you’re also reading it for sapphic romance too, it’s quite underwhelming.

This isn’t a big book and is a quick read but the pacing still is slow with a rushed ending. That said, if you go into reading this with an open mind, with no expectations you will likely find this more enjoyable. The concept is interesting and disturbing, I just wished it went harder with it and truly owned what it was trying to do.

Thank you NetGalley for the copy in exchange for an honest review.

Devilish and deliciously arch
—
Magical realism meets horror in a sapphic remake of Little Shop Of Horrors, alongside body horror, femgore and new adult twenty-first century angst. Phew! It’s a lot, and so worth it. Shell has just lost her job and her long-term relationship has also been kicked to the kerb. When she sees a ‘Help Wanted’ sign at the florist in the dilapidated local mall, she sees it as the universe giving her a break; and Neve, the lovely florist, is just what Shell needs to bring her back to rights. However, the secret of the florists and the mall is the sentient orchid Baby, with its control over Neve and the mall growing by the hour. Will Shell discover the truth behind the mall or will Baby overcome her as he already has Neve?

Told with a nervy, eerie knowingness, Shell’s uncertainty in herself after so many knockbacks is rewarded with strong character development, but with the final salvation coming from barely foreseeable quarters. The devilish and deliciously arch first person narration by Baby makes this book sing, thrusting us deep into the motivations and glee of an eldritch carnivorous monster masquerading as a seductively beautiful and innocent bloom. A worthy addition to the steady diet (pun very much intended!) of literary yet glamorous horror.

I really enjoyed this delightfully strange novel about workplace entanglements, possession, and the everyday horror of retail. Think *Little Shop of Horrors* meets *Day of the Triffids*, set in one of those grimy dirt malls we all secretly love.
The structure won’t be for everyone, the point of view shifts abruptly and without warning, but I found myself charmed by the narrative voice of a giant, hungry, and intensely possessive plant. The sapphic love story is compelling in its doomed inevitability, while Shelley’s former friendship group is frustrating in a way that borders on cartoonish (moustache-twirling included).
Still, I was fully invested, especially in Baby, the monstrous plant at the heart of it all. I rooted for him more than I probably should have.

BRB, off to buy an orchid.

3.5 rounded down

Eat the ones you love is an interesting story that avoids chapters, mixes up formats, and jumps between a lot of characters, so I can understand why this might not work for everyone. Overall, I enjoyed this book, although the audiobook 100% helped with my enjoyment, as it made clear which character we were following. I feel a few more horror scenes would have really helped this book in its genre placement; it also read as a debut for some reason.

Eat the Ones You Love by Sarah Maria Griffin
⭐⭐⭐ 3.5 stars
Publication date: 3rd June 2025

Thank you to Titan Books and Netgalley for providing me with an e-copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Michelle "Shelly" Pine sees a ‘HELP NEEDED’ sign in a flower shop window. She’s recently left her fiancé, and lost her job; she needs something good. Flowers are good, she decides, as is Neve, the beautiful florist. However, an orchid growing nearby is watching her closely. His name is Baby, and Neve 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.

This didn't quite hit the mark as I hoped it would; I'm sad about it because I was so excited about this book and its premise (and the cover? Glorious!)
I liked one of the unexpected narrators, the found family, the crumbling shopping centre, the protagonist reclaiming her life and the subtext about narcissistic, toxic and coercive relationships - this was all good stuff.
But I think I wanted more. A sentient people-eating orchid called Baby is plenty weird, and yet I wanted more weirdness. I wanted more body horror and I definitely wanted more of Shell and Neve. I'm still not sure whether I liked the ending or not, or even what kind of ending I would have liked to see. Overall, there was plenty to enjoy in this book but it left me a tad dissatisfied.

A Sapphic, Irish ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ from the author of ‘Other Words for Smoke’? Beyond wish fulfilment for me!

This is the apocalypse microscoped down to the scale of the soul (whatever that mixture of cogitating and emoting might be), and although every reference to Covid might have been edited out of its final form, ‘Eat the Ones You Love’ is still, most certainly, a Pandemic Novel. It’s decay, it’s a response to monstrosity, it’s an evaluation of humanity versus the loss of community. It’s a meditation on acts of intimacy. ‘Eat the Ones You Love’ has profound things to say about sheltered spaces and the safety we infer from them.

Yes, the novel speaks about love; yes, it speaks about death, but it does so in ways that I’ve rarely seen before, and I dug and I dug and I dug and Sarah Maria Griffin rewards every interrogation with revelation. In the first few pages, she loudspeakers “this is a novel about needing help!” and then spends 300 pages condensing what is observably her fathomless insight into the human complexities of need – needing, recognising need, meeting need – and of help – how and when to ask for it, what to give as it and how to give that.

Griffin launches plural anthropological investigations, all of which can be read or reclassified as Pandemic preoccupations. For instance, what is the function – psychologically and philosophically – of planning for the future; how to go from life looking one way to life looking another way; what are connection points between people?

There are more common deliberations given attention: friendship (how do you make friends? When should you keep them?); coming of age (further into adulthood); and badness (how uncomfortably close can we get to a villain?).
And all of this staggering thoughtstuff is channelled through the higher conceit of GROWING THINGS. We’re encouraged to assess the currency of growing things itself as a value: e.g., Jen leaves Northside Dublin to study growing things on the Burren – the value of growing things translating to value in her career (in fact, Jen’s the single instance in the novel that defies my next point).

It’s easy to say that ALL growth as it’s presented in the novel is cut off. Economic infrastructure growth in Northside Dublin is cut off with the shopping centre closure; the growth of Neve’s relationship is cut off as Jen leaves; the growth of Shell’s cosmopolitan self is cut off by the loss of her job and fiancé and moves back to an underprivileged housing estate; Neve welcomes the growth of our Audrey II – named ‘Baby’ by Griffin (‘a wolf in orchid’s clothing’, she writes) – into her body and this invasion cuts off her selfhood.

There are umpteen other instances of growth being cut off in the novel that repay consideration, and I’m purposefully avoiding the biggest ones: Baby growing in the terrarium at the ‘sick heart’ of the Woodbine Crown; and the growth of Shell’s attraction to Neve. To discuss these would be to spoil the book.

However, the top tier symbolism for growing things cut off is the novel’s situation in a florist’s. In interviews, Griffin has gone into detail about her fascination that cut flowers are death; florists meet people at moments of punctuation in life – growth moments, it can be argued – marriage , birth, new home. And at these moments of significant personal growth, we gift people death – dead things – flowers that we have cut off from growth. (Griffin retrained as a florist after burnout in late 2019.)

There’s reward to be had in further contemplation of floristry. Firstly, as ‘a deeply feminised trade’, Griffin has called it; secondly, apocalyptically speaking, it is a trade that people will be doing until the end of the world (since it’s a trade that AI can’t perform).

Plant Horror, Bildungsroman, Speculative Fiction, Pandemic Novel, Sapphic Romance, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Apocalyptic Fiction, Modern Gothic Romance, Sarah Maria Griffin’s latest release is all these things. To be the first thing she wrote after burnout and deciding she had ‘given up writing’, ‘Eat the Ones You Love’ is life-changingly brilliant, in the true sense of the word: brightly shining; distinguished by talent and cleverness; striking the imagination.

If Little Shop of Horrors were set in a dilapidated mall in Ireland, told from the point of view of a carnivorous orchid named Baby. When the adult life that Shell had been nurturing goes to seed, she returns to her family home and finds herself drawn to both a help wanted sign in a flower shop and to Neve, the florist who runs it. But the mall is crumbling from the inside out, and right at its heart lies a greenhouse where Baby spreads his vines and takes root in Shell's mind. This was funny and dark and kept me turning the pages long after bedtime. TV adaptation when?!?

Say it with flowers….but what are we really saying as we provide artfully arranged dead plant matter to people? Flowers can be symbols of grief, joy or desire. We assign meanings to them and they mark important milestones in life. In Sarah Maria Griffin’s unsettling novel Eat The Ones You Love we have behind an unusual tale of desire, new lives and a very different kind of all seeing narrator.

Shell is at her lowest ebb. She’s broken up with her long time boyfriend Gav; lost her office Marketing job and just for good measure is living back home with her parents and younger sisters. A chance advert in the window of a florist brings her into the world of Neve whose life orbits around her shop which sits in a condemned shopping centre. The two women bond but Shell is unaware that someone else is watching and making plans for her.

There is a huge amount I loved in this novel that keeps us guessing. At first just reading the scenes of Shell’s very unhappy life and this chance advert then immediately bonding with Neve we appear to be in a very wholesome domestic love story but then we realise our third person narration is actually an unseen character and they reveal they have not so kind intentions towards Shell.

This story is often about what is being hidden. To the outside world this shopping centre is on its way out as so many are becoming a sea of empty units and ever growing vape shops but inside Neve’s shop does great work and we find a small but close knit of workers who have illicit drinks and parties in the night. Griffin makes all her charged feel human and watching Shell get accepted and feel part of the world is a really lovely bit of character growth but at the same time we are increasingly aware something malignant is going on.

Floristry works as on one level it’s beauty and art and on another it’s performed in biting cold conditions, often using chemicals and tricks to make the dead things stay alive. Neve and Shell bind and are finding there is an attraction to each other but as our narrator starts to reveal themselves (yes a mysterious plant! Trust me it works) but it’s not alway clear if this is not down to their own mysterious influence. Neve has a secret hidden in her life, one that has destroyed her last serious relationship and it also hides in the rotting shopping centre, aptly as the story grows we feel this presence growing in power and planning for its next step in growth. It tells us of its past crimes and the people it’s killed. It’s not a moustache twirling monster but something that very much sees its own survival more important than the humans it is around. It’s ruthless, merciless and doesn’t like to be told what to do. How this plan now features Shell is a growing theme and tension in the book. Is Shell another feeding opportunity or something else?

Neve is a fascinating character and we rarely get into her thoughts. She seems a workaholic, we get to see her last break up and the growing attraction with Shell is starting to let her open up. But our narrator also reveals Neve’s if not outright involvement in deaths but at least a knowledge of them and ensuring no one else knows about them. We are kept guessing all to the end where Neve really fits into these events and it adds a lot of danger to this what could have been a simple romance.

It’s the ending where I think things get a little too frenetic. After so much build up I was expecting characters to start realising what the others were all up to and indeed that our unseen narrator really lets rip. Initially this seems the case but then we get some very quick wrapping up of storylines and even a softer ending that undercuts what we know has been going on. It’s perhaps a little too tidy and for needed the characters to at least start sharing their secrets a lot more - perhaps they would still accept them or been repelled but without that I felt slightly cheated of the drama explosion I was hoping for.

Despite that the wonderful strange mix of of horror and the domestic make this an engaging story and Griffin ensures with our unusual narrator we have what could be a very normal tale told in a very different manner. The character work is beautiful and watching this hidden world unfurl its wonders and terrors made for a really interesting read. Definitely worth a look!

EAT THE ONES YOU LOVE is so weird, but a good weird, and I think that's exactly what the author may have intended with this book! The story follows Shell, a young woman who begins to work at a flower shop run by Neve, and not that anyone knows it, by Baby, the parasitic orchid with a preference for eating humans. I think the weirdness of this book is what made me enjoy it so much, and coupled with the real eccentricity of young people and life, cinches it as a great read of 2025. The prose is down-to-earth and violent, and I love how Griffin tackles obsession and hunger and love and lust all through these wacky POVs. I think if you're in the mood for something fresh, particularly in the horror genre, this one is the book for you!

Eat the Ones You Love is a unique and compelling horror tale from Sarah Maria Griffin. The story follows Shell, a young woman who has moved back home following a split from her boyfriend and the loss of her job. She sees a sign advertising a job in the local florist. Shell takes the job working for the beautiful Neve in the local shopping mall. But Neve isn’t all that meets the eye – she belongs to Baby the orchid that grows in the heart of the mall and Baby’s hungry, hungry for human flesh.

This has got to be one of the most strange and unusual stories I’ve ever read. This is my second book from Sarah Maria Griffin and it was a really enjoyable read. I really liked Griffin’s prose and I thought she did a brilliant job of describing this dilapidated shopping mall that’s slowly rotting away. Griffin also builds the tension really well and I loved the tense, unsettling atmosphere in this story, particularly in the chapters from Baby’s perspective.

The characters were well crafted and I really enjoyed Shell’s story. She’s quite lost and unsure at the start of the story and develops into so much more. I also liked the way Griffin developed the relationship between Shell and Neve as the story progressed. Eat the Ones You Love is well paced and the story ended in a way that I definitely didn’t expect. This unique, slightly unhinged tale is definitely unlike anything I’ve read before so if you love creepy plants or horror books that will stick with you long after reading, you definitely need Eat the Ones You Love on your reading list.

I absolutely loved the atmosphere and the relationship between Shell and Neve and the little nods this book gave to the little shop of horrors, It was a quick paced fun read 4 stars.

Loved this! The voice and perspective of the "narrator" made a really interesting approach to storytelling

I knew Sarah Maria Griffin was the queen of weird after reading Other Words for Smoke, and Eat the Ones You Love only further solidifies that title.
The slow building tension of the novel, through the eyes of our beloved Baby, is genius in how it lures you into Shell and Neve's world whilst unsettling you chapter by chapter. I absolutely loved rooting for Shell and Neve's romance, despite becoming creepily obsessed with the plant that can't let either woman go.
The twists and turns of this book are more branches from the trunk, than diverging paths, as Griffin masterfully shows where the novel is going whilst simultaneously shocking you in the moment. This was a book that I just had to savour - each page as important as the last.

Something tickles my brain in all the right places with creepy LGBTQ+ horror and Eat the Ones You Love ticked all the right boxes.

This just got weirder as it went on, in the absolute best way, but I'm not sure I liked the ending? I feel like it would have made sense if it was just fleshed out by like 50 pages, give it more space to breathe. I don't think it's a bad ending at all, just not the one I think the brilliance of the book deserved.