The Unfamiliar Garden (The Comet Cycle book 2) by Benjamin Percy (book review).
The idea that comets bring doom is hardly new. An image of Halley’s Comet is famously embroidered into the Bayeux Tapestry, implying heavenly consent to William of Normandy’s conquest of England. There are similar elements in Lovecraft’s ‘Colour Out Of Space’ and John Wyndham’s ‘The Day Of The Triffids’.
While not exactly comets, both of these feature shooting stars that change the lives of those who witness them. More recently, we’ve had the the black comedy ‘Don’t Look Up’, which inverts this somewhat, with scientists correctly identifying the astronomical threat, but society at large preferring to ignore it, satirising the way governments handle climate change.
As such, Benjamin Percy’s novel, ‘The Unfamiliar Garden’, fits very much into a tradition of using comets as, in a sense, an atheistic hand of God, visiting disaster on mankind for one reason or another. In this case, the comet causes massive changes to weather patterns (again, ticking that metaphor for climate change box) while bringing into the mix the quasi-religious strand that runs through humanity when threatened. Indeed, the story kicks off with what appears to be a ritualistic human sacrifice, treated as a murder, with one of the two lead characters, Nora, being the cop investigating the crime.
Of course, this being horror-fantasy, there’s nothing quite so simple as murder going on here. The wake of the comet triggered a change in the Earth’s biosphere and, while people start off thinking things are going back to normal, in fact, the world is changing. Certain fungi have become parasitic on people, changing their behaviour, something some microbes can actually do, though on simpler animals than us, such as ants and snails. This time, seemingly everything is vulnerable, from whales to owls and, of course, people.
Fortunately for Nora, her husband, Jack, is a biologist who specialises in fungi. Together, they’re able to unpick the mystery, which involves not just weird fungi but a secretive government programme and the disappearance of their daughter, Mia. All of this is told briskly and the story clips along nicely. Somewhat like ‘The Day Of The Triffids’, the story ends with a new normal being established, rather than the threat being undone.
Percy does a great job of evoking the time and place involved. Set in a post-Covid world with hints of the rotten core at the heart of US government, the very idea of fungal decay being an ambiguous thing is central to the plot. Rot, mould and mushrooms provide a sensory component that not only bring to mind the damp richness of old forest and fallen trees, but also the burning need for regeneration when things have stood still for too long.
In the tradition of all great apocalyptic fiction writers, writer Benjamin Percy is suggesting that our world needs to be broken down and re-grown into something new and better. That he does this with considerable style and superb pacing is to his credit, though the physical body horror described at various places might not appeal to all readers.
Neale Monks
February 2022
(pub: Mariner Books, 2022. 208 page small enlarged paperback. Price: $15.99 (US). £ 8.99 (UK) – 07 July 2022. ISBN: 978-1-32854-488-9)
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