They bloom at night by Trang Thanh Tran

They bloom at night conveys the feeling of trauma informed writing. The writing is raw and simultaneously revealing and concealing. There is a disturbing sense of something being very wrong beneath the surface. The surface doesn't look too good either. The story could be read on a literal level or on a metaphoric, symbolic level. This reader sees They bloom at night as a text that points to somewhere else - a dark place. There are hints about the cause of the personal hurt and ultimately there is disclosure and a kind of healing.  Mirroring the human pain, the environment is equally hurting with the submerging town scenario serving as a metaphor for the human impact on the environment. The townspeople of Mercy are being displaced just as the central Vietnamese family were displaced from their home country.

The lead character Noon is of Vietnamese origin and still coping with the problem of diaspora. Noon has trouble living in her own skin it seems and the internal struggle and references to wanting to shed like a snake and become something new and fresh mirrors the algal bloom spead and has its roots in a trauma.  Noon states, "Here's the truth: my life went apocalyptic ...when I lost my virginity...I am all the wrong shapes, skin flaking away to shell under prying fingers." Noon and her mother are coping with the loss of the family father and brother and living a precarious existence in the waterways of a broken down town called Mercy somewhere on the Mississippi floodplain close to the Gulf of Mexico. In all respects this is a town that has submerged as the result of unspecified environmental changes. Water level has risen; houses have been flooded. As Noon further states, "The bloom has claimed much of our town of Mercy, red algae spilling over the Mississippi and adjacent flood like entrails." This sentence reflects the tone and descriptiveness of the novel. The bloom, with its tendrils spreading throughout the water and reaching into bodies and under skin looks something like entrails. The land, the waters, humans and marine creatures have become infested with algal growth in a horrific, visceral way.  As the red algal bloom infests everything, wildlife is mutated, the riverways and ocean become choked and there seems to be a further unknown menace from underwater.  Townspeople go missing and are found in a zombie-like state - half dissolved in the algal infested water and dangerous.

Through the first person narration of Noon the reader gradually learns of her past and her courageous plan to secure a safer future away from Mercy with her mother. Along the way she makes true friends for the first time and literally and symbolically rids herself of her old skin to take on a new one. The process is painful and abhorrent. She has to escape predators, understand the problem and survive. The monsters are both within and outside.

 American writer Trang Thanh Tran, author of New York Times bestselling horror story She is a haunting has delivered in They bloom at night, a psychological, environmental, dystopian, speculative horror story. 

Themes: Algal bloom, eco-dystopia, the monster within and outside, predators, trauma, friendship, Vietnamese diaspora, identity.

Wendy Jeffrey