Gabino Iglesias Reviews Where Darkness Blooms by Andrea Hannah

Where Darkness Blooms, Andrea Hannah (Wednesday Books 978-1-25084-262-6, $18.99, 320pp, hc) February 2023.

YA fiction has grown by leaps and bounds in terms of diversity and the topics it deals with, and Andrea Hannah’s Where Darkness Blooms is a perfect example of how inclusive, deep, and complex the genre of young adult fiction can be, especially when mixed with speculative fiction. At once the story of a group of young women trying to escape a cursed town, a tale of loss, anger, and heartache, and a narrative that touches on growing up, sexual abuse, and misogyny, this is the kind of YA novel that makes you quickly forget it was intended for a younger audience.

Bishop is a small town known for its brutal and continuous windstorms and for being surrounded by a seemingly endless field of tall sunflowers that don’t seem to care about the time of year of how hard the wind blows. It’s also known for the inordinate amount of women that have gone miss­ing. Or have been found dead under mysterious circumstances… or dead of natural causes even if they were young and in perfect health. Women simply vanish in Bishop from time to time, so when three more women, all of them mothers and beloved community members, disappeared one night, no one in town was surprised. Whenever women go missing, the town’s authorities quickly move on, and the people have learned to do the same. This time, however, the women left behind their daughters – Delilah, Whitney and her twin sister Jude, and Bo – and they all feel like things don’t add up. The girls keep sharing the same house where they lived before the disappearance of their mothers, whose absence haunts them daily. Unfortunately, losing their mothers isn’t the only thing these they must deal with. The deaths are now coming closer to each other; Bo lives in perpetual anger because of a dark, painful secret; Whitney’s girlfriend, who was young and healthy, was found dead; and Delilah and Jude are in love with the same boy, and Delilah feels a lot of pain whenever he touches her. The girls must figure out what happened to their mothers, or they could be next, but whenever they try to ask questions, they wind starts blowing.

Where Darkness Blooms is a horror story where the wind is alive and controlled by an evil man, the sunflowers whisper, and women regular­ly die or vanish without a trace. However, it’s also a tale of sisterhood, perseverance, and growing up. Hannah deftly juggles these four young women and the novel’s chapters shift perspectives between them. Also, from Bo’s story of sexual abuse and the narrative’s critique of patriarchy to Whitney being a member of the LGBTQ+ community and the presence of racial diversity, this novel feels incredibly necessary and timely, especially when you look at the ongoing fight to ban books that offer diverse perspective of contain BIPOC or LGBTQ+ characters.

As an avid horror reader, there were parts in this book where I wanted more blood and violence and richer descriptions, but Hannah did a nice job of delivering enough of those elements to still make this an enjoyable read with a fair amount of brutality. Also, most of that brutality is directed at and inflicted upon women, and that which makes this an uncomfortable, necessary read that isn’t afraid to look at misogyny and inequality and show that the best thing you can do when you encounter those things is fight them with everything you have.

This review and more like it in the July 2023 issue of Locus.

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