This book is a gloriously weird trip like if a queer commune got lost in an eldritch forest and decided to vibe with the horror instead of running. It’s psychedelic, creepy, and hilariously sharp.

A psychedelic lesbian cult with a sordid past.
A girl who grows shrooms to earn some money.
An eldritch forest that is constantly changing.
A God and goddess who are hellbent on being reborn.
Raccoons upon raccoons.
Praise the Green Goddess!
Don't be a phallic Alec and read this book!

This book was wild! I was so weirded out at times but I couldn’t put it down. I read an eARC of this book on NetGalley so thank you to the author and the publisher.

This book follows a trans woman who cultivates mushrooms. She’s asked to go to a specific forest to find a rare and powerful mushroom. She follows a ranger into the forest to find it, but things start to get very freaky. The ranger navigates by dead bodies in the forest and she is warned of danger in the forest. Alongside we also meet members of lesbian cult in the forest involving mushrooms and raccoons. It feels odd to describe, but it’s genuinely amazing.

I loved how mindblowing this felt. I couldn’t predict where this book was going to go. Reading it was like going down a slide increasingly quickly in the dark and not knowing where the end was. It was utterly thrilling. It’s been a while since I read something that felt like this.

This book is atmospheric, unusual and exciting. I loved the setting, the mushroom focus and the freaky intense cult!

Moonflow is a horror novel about a mushroom-growing trans woman who ends up being lured to a female cult in the woods by a mysterious entity. Sarah needs money and her best bet is to find the mushroom that her friend wants, the powerful King's Breakfast. It only grows in the Pamogo forest, so Sarah heads off with the help of Andy, who works at the visitor centre and doesn't approve of her plan to sell the mushroom. Once in the forest, they find themselves being lured deeper, but once there, they find a weird cult of gender essentialist women.

Before starting this book, I didn't actually realise it was so much like something I'd usually read, as the blurb I read didn't really emphasise the trans splatterpunk nature of it, but Moonflow is like if you crossed Alison Rumfitt's books with the mushroom-y vibes of Mexican Gothic, with a heavy dash of Gretchen Felker-Martin as well. It's the sort of horror that manages to become satirical and darkly funny, whilst also being cuttingly real about certain elements (the cult's obsession with saying 'phallic alec', for example). It starts off slow, with a great glitched phone element and the fear of forgetting something, but quickly becomes much weirder with a cult focused on lesbian sex and psychedelic substances. The ending is satisfyingly disgusting, with a cosmic horror style lack of real resolution about what happened.

If you like trans horror, Moonflow is a fun botanical take on the genre that combines the horror of eldritch beings and mysterious fungi with the horror of a feminine-obsessed cult to explore different ideas of what happens once you learn something you can't turn away from.

3.5 stars rounded up.

This was a trippy read and I’m not sure I fully absorbed it! I loved the creepy forest setting and the cult theme, but I didn’t get invested into any specific character. I didn’t love the main character Sarah, but they also didn’t annoy me.

The ending was pretty far out for this little mama.

Thank you NetGalley and Little, Brown Book Group UK for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A fungus fuelled fever dream.
I really don’t know how I feel about this book, it was certainly one hell of a trip!
It was grossly visceral and chock full of shock, it definitely earned every single one of the trigger warnings at the beginning. We take a journey through the deep dark and foreboding Pamoga state forest, this is constantly changing and is disturbingly desolate, the only landmarks are the dead bodies. Sarah and guide Andy are in search of a special mushroom, but although they are semi successful, they find more than they expected when they stumble across an orgiastic lesbian cult who worship the Green Lady.
This is definitely not for most, I’m not even sure if it was for me, but I found it strangely compelling.

Hard to rate this one, since it wasn't the right choice for me. I expected gore and nasty things happening (physically and emotionally), but I misjudged what it would really be like.

The first chapters were good, suitable to my taste. Already setting the tone of the book, quite trippy and, yes, irreverent. But as the story progressed, it became too much for me, especially as we met the Sisters living in the forest. The humour became too much, the descriptions of body parts became too much, and the way the Sisters living in the Pamogo Forest thought about femininity and their reaction weren't something I wanted to continue reading.

Still it has to be said that the writing is good, very easy to read, and the characters have quite a good sense of nuance, which is always something I'm looking for in fiction.

Bitter Karella has absolutely knocked it out the park with this debut horror. Her prose is effortlessly readable, able to go from genuinely funny to incredibly disturbing in less than a sentence. The horror does not hold back and when things escalate, it is beautifully extreme in it’s gory carnage. It’s spooky, sexy(?), and most importantly is happy to show believable messy queer people, even if they’re tied up in a psychedelic mushroom cult worshipping eldritch forest gods. Highly recommended for anyone who’s a fan of Gretchen Felker-Martin or Alison Rummfit.