As humans confront a rapidly changing climate and our role in causing it, there has been an increased appetite for horror stories that delve into the frightening connections, and disconnections that we have from the natural world. Recently, “sporror,” has become a subgenre exploring the intricate beauty and menace of the mycelial networks beneath our very feet. In Merlin Sheldrake’s book, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change our Minds and Shape our Futures, the author describes how fungi are “inside you and around you. They sustain you and all that you depend on. As you read these words, fungi are changing the way that life happens, as they have done for more than a billion years.” Sheldrake’s work speaks to how life on Earth is sustained by fungi, and the many mysteries still underlying fungal networks and growth.
But why are we drawn to fungal horror? Is it because a part of us understands how powerful fungi can be? Do we both fear and long for that kind of connection that mycelial networks create? These stories delve into our fascination with the variety and beauty of fungi while mining the very real fears of losing the individual self, which is uniquely frightening, with a combined longing to being a part of the collective. Sporror books allow writers to dig into familial relationships, fears about our bodies, grief, isolation and so much more while letting the fungal spores germinate inside us to grow something entirely new. If you love mushrooms or just want some creepy reads to add to your TBR, this list is for you!
Root Rot by Saskia Nislow
This unsettling novella chronicles the journey of nine children who travel to their Grandfather’s vacation home by The Lake. At first, all of the siblings and cousins are having fun playing, roaming the house and the surrounding woods. Told in the collective “we” of the children, strange things begin to happen to them as they come across the spores of mushrooms in the woods: the children begin to change, their perceptions of one another warping along with their sense of time and space; dopplegangers grow up from the ground, mushrooms in the woods leak blood. One of the children, dubbed “The Liar,” is forced to confront the fearful change overtaking the others, and to choose whether to resist or submit to what is happening to them. The way this book warps the boundaries between family, home and the body is fantastically eerie!
Girl in the Creek by Wendy N. Wagner
Another dive into the creepiness that lurks in the woods! Freelance writer Erin Harper is on assignment in Faraday, Oregon, for her travel magazine, but her real motivation for the trip is to learn anything she can about her brother Bryan who went missing in the woods of Mount Hood National park five years ago. Along with her friend Hari, who has a podcast documenting missing and murdered people, they team up with their friends and locals to learn more about Faraday and why so many people, especially women, go missing there every year. When a local girl’s body goes missing from the morgue and Erin finds strange sparkling spores across the woods, she must find out how these spores are infecting those unlucky enough to venture into the woods, taking over their bodies and controlling their minds by an entity known only as The Strange.
“Fruiting Bodies” by Ashley Robin Franklin
Frances is traveling with her brother Charlie and his annoying friend Trent through the rainy Oregon woods on a last road trip before Frances moves in with her partner in the Pacific Northwest. But when they take a wrong turn and become lost in the woods, they are forced to camp out. When they meet a beautiful woman who seems particularly interested in Frances, she seems like she can help them, but mushrooms taking over her body are searching to colonize them too. Writer and illustrator Ashley Robin Franklin is a master of queer body horror comics, and “Fruiting Bodies,” offered as both a chapbook and also in her longer graphic novel collection, The Skin You’re In, takes the dark atmosphere of the Oregon woods combined with the underlying fears that Frances is feeling about reaching a new intimacy with her partner to create a perfectly unsettling comic!
The Ghost Eaters by Clay McLeod Chapman
Erin can’t seem to shake the spellbinding pull that her charismatic ex, Silas, has on her. Still, Erin is trying to make a new life for herself, and leave Silas behind. But when Silas dies from an overdose, Erin learns from their mutual friend that Silas was using a new drug derived from white mushrooms that allows the user to see the dead. Erin agrees to attend a drug-induced “seance” to make her grieving friend feel better, but is suddenly seeing the dead everywhere, pressing in on her even as she tries to return to her normal life. And as Erin descends into the addiction of being “haunted,” she’s unsure if she will be able to stop. This book is both deeply creepy and speaks to people’s willingness to sacrifice themselves to the altar of their grief in a way that will have you both squirming with discomfort and edging closer for more.
Graveyard Shift by M.L. Rio
In this novella, an unlikely group of five friends meet every night in the Saint Anthony the Anchorite Church’s abandoned cemetery to commiserate over their shared struggles working the night shifts at their respective jobs. One evening in October, they meet up as usual only to find a freshly dug grave that wasn’t there before. As Edie, a journalism student and Tuck, a former microbiology student with an affinity for fungi, investigate the gravedigger behind the mysterious grave, Theo, a jaded bartender, Tamar, a hotel receptionist bored and prone to research, and Hannah, a rideshare driver who struggles with insomnia dive down a rabbit hole that may lead to sinister lab research of fungal supplements that are causing unexpected and frightening side effects and the researcher covering them up. This slim novella takes place over the course of one night and is the perfect gothic mystery to read through the night.
Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon
When Vern, a teenager who is seven months pregnant, flees into the woods to escape the controlling religious commune, The Blessed Acres of Cain, where she was raised, her life is changed forever. Giving birth to twins in the woods, she decides to raise them in isolation from the outside world. As her babies grow up, Vern’s own body begins to change in uncanny and sometimes frightening ways, her strength and stamina making her stop at nothing, including brutality, to protect her children from the Cainites, who would seek to get her back at any cost. She is haunted by visions of her pursuers, believing at first that Reverend Sherman, the leader of the commune and her husband, has drugged her and all of his disciples. Vern seeks out her old friend Lucy who fled the commune with her mother, and learns from an EMT that her visions and bodily transformations could be caused by a never before seen fungal infection. The further that Vern goes to find the truth about herself and the community she fled, the more she finds that the horrors lead back to the historical racial violence of the United States itself. Rivers Solomon’s genre-blending storytelling delves deep into inherited traumas and how one creates an autonomous sense of self outside of the oppressive control of others.
The Marigold by Andrew F. Sullivan
Set in a near-future Toronto, The Marigold, built as a luxury condo towering above the skyline now sits half-filled and decaying with neglect as the residents deal with a mysterious toxic mold spreading throughout the building and into the rest of the city. Weaving together the stories of a public health inspector looking into the infestation, a rideshare driver who discovers some unsettling data about the Marigold and a preteen whose friend was snatched by a creature from below the city, this novel explores eco and body horror and the urban dystopia of unfettered development and greed in a time of climate collapse. It’s certainly a bleak tale, but one with some unhinged humor that many readers can relate to.
House of Rot by Danger Slater
This domestic indie horror novel creeps into your skin. In it, newlyweds Elenya and Myles find pink mold they find growing under their sink, encroaching on the rest of their apartment. They begin hearing footsteps in the night, and as the mold continues to grow, they realize that they may not be able to escape. Equal parts revolting and touching, this slim book will make your skin crawl.
Dark Spores, edited by Carol Gyzander & Rachel A. Brune
This incredible anthology features some of the best indie horror writers and their takes on “sporror” that ranges from the disgusting to the futuristic and uncanny stories. In his foreword, Clay Mcleod Chapman describes “the stories you find in your hands now are in of themselves fruiting bodies-spores of a different sort-ready to spread their own particular terrors.” Some of my favorite stories in the anthology were the most bizarrely creepy, like “NEW MOM GROW KIT: TWO STARS” by Rick Claypool, “The Parasitium” by M. Lopes da Silva and “Fun Gus” by Pedro Iniguez. No matter what kind of weird fungal story you’re into, this anthology has a story or a creepy poem for you.
I’m guessing you wanted to get off the path, hence no usual suspects like Kingfisher, Vandermeer, Carey, Sullivan or Moreno-Garcia, which is fine.
I’d like to offer some vintage titles such as Hodgson’s evergreen, “The Voice in the Night” (and the accompanying, quite good, adaptation for Alfred Hitchcock’s sadly neglected “Suspicion” TV series), Brian Lumley’s seminal “Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungai,” and the British Library Tales of the Weird anthology, “Spores of Doom: Tales of the Fungal Weird,” edited by Aaron Worth.
I enjoyed the sporror in Caitlin Starling’s The Luminous Dead and Lily Anderson’s Undead Girl Gang. Graveyard Shift by ML Rio has a touch.
An early and fun entry in this category is Ray Bradbury’s 1962 short story, “Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar” (alt. title, “Come Into My Cellar”). Great stuff, and certainly macabre.
Cold Storage by David Koepp is about a fast infectious fungus.
Ben Aaronovitch, author of the Rivers of London series, has a graphic comic with the characters from his book series dealing with a supernatural black mold, called The Black Mould.