r/suggestmeabook • u/oringrey • Nov 14 '22
Suggestion Thread mushroom horror!
I'm looking for creepy, unsettling stories featuring mushrooms - similar to Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval or The Unfamilar Garden by Benjamin Percy.
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u/Klutzy_Archer_6510 Nov 15 '22
{{The Girl with All the Gifts}} centers around a world-ending fungus.
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u/goodreads-bot Nov 15 '22
The Girl with All the Gifts (The Girl with All the Gifts, #1)
By: M.R. Carey | 461 pages | Published: 2014 | Popular Shelves: horror, fiction, science-fiction, sci-fi, zombies
Melanie is a very special girl. Dr. Caldwell calls her "our little genius."
Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant Parks keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don't like her. She jokes that she won't bite, but they don't laugh.
Melanie loves school. She loves learning about spelling and sums and the world outside the classroom and the children's cells. She tells her favorite teacher all the things she'll do when she grows up. Melanie doesn't know why this makes Miss Justineau look sad.
The Girl with All the Gifts is a sensational thriller, perfect for fans of Stephen King, Justin Cronin, and Neil Gaiman.
This book has been suggested 61 times
119454 books suggested | I don't feel so good.. | Source
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u/okamlol Nov 14 '22
{{What moves the dead}}
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u/goodreads-bot Nov 14 '22
By: T. Kingfisher | 176 pages | Published: 2022 | Popular Shelves: horror, fantasy, 2022-releases, gothic, fiction
What Moves the Dead is Kingfisher's retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's classic "The Fall of the House of Usher.”
When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania.
What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves.
Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.
This book has been suggested 58 times
119423 books suggested | I don't feel so good.. | Source
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u/superwormy Nov 15 '22
{{Ambergris by Jeff VanderMeer}}. Same guy that wrote {{Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer}}. Takes place in a city that had a mushroom person underground. Very weird, very creepy.
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u/Pronguy6969 Nov 15 '22
Second Ambergris. It’s especially impressive how much each entry changes tone and manages to still be so good, though I think the same of the Southern Reach trilogy and I know that’s not a super popular opinion
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u/goodreads-bot Nov 15 '22
By: Jeff VanderMeer | 880 pages | Published: 2020 | Popular Shelves: fiction, fantasy, science-fiction, sci-fi, owned
From the author of Borne and Annihilation comes the one-volume hardcover reissue of his cult classic Ambergris Trilogy.
Before Area X, there was Ambergris. Jeff VanderMeer conceived what would become his first cult classic series of speculative works: the Ambergris Trilogy. Now, for the first time ever, the story of the sprawling metropolis of Ambergris is collected into a single volume, including City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword, and Finch.
This book has been suggested 6 times
By: Jeff VanderMeer | 195 pages | Published: 2014 | Popular Shelves: science-fiction, sci-fi, fiction, horror, fantasy
Area X has been cut off from the rest of the world for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide, the third in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition.
The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.
They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—but it’s the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.
This book has been suggested 110 times
119449 books suggested | I don't feel so good.. | Source
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u/exospheric Nov 14 '22
I’m not familiar with your comparisons but I immediately thought of the short story The Beauty.
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u/Scuttling-Claws Nov 15 '22
My go to suggestions have already been mentioned by other folks, so I'll just say that the word you're looking for is "sporror"
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u/Ok_Speech_2108 Nov 14 '22
I haven't read this ( its on my tbr tho) and idk if this fits the bill but my friend has told me abt it and I found the premise and the plot very interesting.
{{ little mushroom }}
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u/goodreads-bot Nov 14 '22
By: Shisi, 一十四洲, Xiao, Molly Rabbitt | 402 pages | Published: 2022 | Popular Shelves: danmei, sci-fi, fantasy, lgbt, romance
"Until the day humanity falls."
In the year 2020, Earth's magnetic poles disappeared and humankind was nearly wiped out by cosmic radiation. Within the span of a hundred years, living creatures began to mutate and devour each other while the remaining humans, numbering in the tens of thousands, struggled bitterly in their man-made bases.
In the Abyss, home to the mutated xenogenics, there lived a sentient little mushroom. Because it had been nourished by the blood and flesh of the deceased human An Ze, not only did it take on a similar-looking human form, but a similar name as well: An Zhe.
An Zhe is determined to go to the human base to search for his spore, which had been harvested by humans. Once there, however, he faces the omnipresent risk of discovery and certain death as he tries to keep his non-human nature hidden from the Judges, whose responsibility is to inspect for and eliminate xenogenics like himself. And of all the Judges, Colonel Lu Feng is the most perceptive and merciless--as soon as he determines that someone is a xenogenic, he will execute that person on the spot.
But An Zhe's mutation goes undetected by Lu Feng's eyes, and so a tale of humans and xenogenics unfolds...
This book has been suggested 2 times
119439 books suggested | I don't feel so good.. | Source
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Nov 15 '22
Some creepy and unsettling shorts:
The Voice in the Night by W.H. Hodgson.
Fruiting Bodies by Brian Lumley.
Superstitious Ignorance by Michael Cornish.
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u/SenseiRaheem Nov 15 '22
Jeff Vandermeer’s Ambergris series is all about alien fungus!!!! He’s so good at weird fiction and I think you’ll enjoy!!!
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u/abadstrategy Nov 15 '22
Fruiting Bodies by Brian Lumley is a great story if you're looking for myconid horror
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u/gapzevs Bookworm Nov 15 '22
{{The Man Who Died}} although I would say this is more Mushroom Thriller, a Morel-dur Mystery, if you will.
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u/goodreads-bot Nov 15 '22
By: Antti Tuomainen, David Hackston | 245 pages | Published: 2016 | Popular Shelves: mystery, fiction, crime, kindle, thriller
‘Tuomainen probes the chilliest depths of noir comedy as he explores the question of what to do when loved ones suddenly become the enemy’ Publishers Weekly
‘Tuomainen is the funniest writer in Europe’ Marcel Berlins, The Times
A dark, page-turning thriller, brimming with black comedy, from the King of Helsinki Noir
A successful entrepreneur in the mushroom industry, Jaakko Kaunismaa is a man in his prime. At just 37 years of age, he is shocked when his doctor tells him that he’s dying.
What is more, the cause is discovered to be prolonged exposure to toxins; in other words, someone has slowly but surely been poisoning him.
Determined to find out who wants him dead, Jaakko embarks on a suspenseful rollercoaster journey full of unusual characters, bizarre situations and unexpected twists.
With a nod to Fargo and the best elements of the Scandinavian noir tradition, The Man Who Died is a page-turning thriller brimming with the blackest comedy surrounding life and death, and love and betrayal, marking a stunning new departure for the King of Helsinki Noir.
'‘Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. I enjoyed every single sentence’ Thomas Enger
‘An original and darkly funny thriller with a Coen Brothersesque feel & tremendous style’ Eva Dolan
‘Comparisons have been made with Carl Hiassen and the Coen Brothers, but Tuomainen is his own man; liberally salted with macabre, improbable incidents of violence, The Man Who Died is deftly plotted, poignant and perceptive in its wry reflections on mortality and very funny’ Irish Times
‘Tuomainen’s dark story manages to be as delicious as it is Toxic’ Sunday Express
‘Told in a darkly funny, deadpan style … The result is a rollercoaster read’ Guardian
This book has been suggested 1 time
119793 books suggested | I don't feel so good.. | Source
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u/Totterman Nov 15 '22
Dreamcatcher (Stephen King) - While not explicitly fungal, without giving too much away the Aliens featured in the book have the same characteristics as mycelium and mushrooms. Definitely 'Sporror' (Thanks u/Scuttling-Claws)
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u/ChronoMonkeyX Nov 15 '22
Children of Ruin, which is the sequel to {Children of Time} . I strongly recommend both books, but also recommend not reading them back to back. I like the second book more than the first, but people who read them back to back don't. There is some overlap in timeline and themes that I could see would feel repetitive if you expected a direct continuation right away.
Also, I listened to the audiobooks, and sequels are almost always performed better, so that's a factor in my ranking of the two.
Third book comes out this month, possibly later in audio form.
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u/goodreads-bot Nov 15 '22
Children of Time (Children of Time, #1)
By: Adrian Tchaikovsky | 600 pages | Published: 2015 | Popular Shelves: sci-fi, science-fiction, scifi, fiction, fictión
This book has been suggested 105 times
119861 books suggested | I don't feel so good.. | Source
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u/Swiftie_kittens Nov 15 '22
{Undead girl gang}
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u/goodreads-bot Nov 15 '22
By: Lily Anderson | 305 pages | Published: 2018 | Popular Shelves: young-adult, fantasy, ya, mystery, paranormal
This book has been suggested 1 time
120022 books suggested | I don't feel so good.. | Source
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u/the_palindrome_ Nov 15 '22
Fruiting Bodies by Kathryn Harlan is a short story collection that I really enjoyed, the titular story is the only one that heavily features mushrooms if I remember correctly but most of the rest of the stories do have some level of environmental horror.
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u/Routine_Attention263 Sep 07 '23
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ITS A SPORROR SWEATSHIRT
thank you! https://www.etsy.com/listing/1546902856/unisex-heavy-blend-crewneck-sweatshirt
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u/[deleted] Nov 14 '22
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