The Blob Is Back in Town: Paul Tremblay’s “In Bloom”

Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Paul Tremblay’s “In Bloom,” first published in 2023 as an Amazon Original. Spoilers ahead!

Heidi Cohen is a freelance journalist, working on a piece about the blue-green algae blooms plaguing Cape Cod’s waterways. Water temperatures in the ponds, saltwater riverways, and bays have averaged more than ten degrees higher than fifteen years ago, and each summer is hotter than the last. As she crosses the Bourne Bridge en route to an interview, she can see the Cape Cod Canal; “the undulating, fluorescent-green water bullying the shores looks alive.”

It’s an unsettling sight given her research on the effects of cyanobacteria neurotoxins on humans. She’s brought along N95 masks, but doubts their efficacy against the hallucinogenic toxic gases that some blooms can generate.

Her drive gives her time to switch from fretting about algae blooms to fretting about her housemate Ty Yoshida. The two have shared an East Providence apartment through pandemic shutdowns and become close friends. But now she feels their relationship moving toward something more, a situation fraught with potential dangers as well as potential benefits. “So, yeah, it’s complicated.”

Recently she’s been combing microfiche files of the Cape Cod Times for articles about previous blooms. She learns about the 1983 tragedy in Orleans, when a Cape League baseball game ended in a drowning, a disappearance, and many sick players and fans. A librarian has given her a lead on an eyewitness of the incident, Jimmy Lang, who’s a “walking oral historian of the kind of things people want to forget.” She meets Jimmy in a Dennis cafe. He’s a middle-aged “bear of a man” with the look of “college professor meets longshoreman” who combines drawing cartoons for the regional paper and captaining a charter boat for ecologists. Disarmed by his cheerful frankness, Heidi talks about how her parents meant to retire in Dennisport until high costs and taxes forced them to sell their house. She even mentions her “complicated” relationship with Ty.

Then, “with a staggering amount of personal detail and confession,” Jimmy tells her what happened to him in 1983. Parts of his story seem beyond belief, but she’s learned “there are always truths submerged within stories,” and it’s her job to find them.

Jimmy’s father was a baseball fanatic who kept stats on every game he attended. It disappointed him that his son couldn’t be coached-slash-bullied into a local Little League star. Jimmy much preferred comic books and drawing to swinging bats, and was finally allowed to drop the sport at age twelve. Meanwhile, his parents were coasting down a steepening slope to separation.

The Langs vacationed on the Cape each July. Their first day in 1983, Dad announces that he’s going to an Orleans Cardinals game. Because he invited Jimmy rather than ordering him to come, Jimmy goes along. He soon tires of sitting under the blazing sun and retreats to a playground beyond the outfield. From a shady perch in a play-structure, he can watch Dad while studying a favorite Swamp Thing comic. He begins to see Dad’s intensity as oddly vulnerable; when a stray hit goes into the weeds surrounding Boland Pond, Jimmy wants to retrieve it for his father.

The game’s interrupted by a teenage girl screaming for help. She’s dared her younger brother to dive into the algae-scummed pond. He has, but surfaced thrashing, stricken. The girl ran into the water but couldn’t pull him out. She staggers ashore with her skin already erupting into a welty rash, then falls down vomiting. Jimmy races toward the pond, as do many from the ballfield including Dad. A smell combining lilac sweetness with swampy stink makes him halt, light-headed. His vision loses focus. Static hums in his ears. Other would-be rescuers stagger around “like honeybees drunk on smoke.” One group has fallen into a “dogpile” like worms balled together. Under the hallucinogenic influence of bloom gases, Jimmy feels he can pick up the “dogpile’s” thoughts. He seems to regress through the “coded memory of…DNA” to “a singular primitive sentience.” He wants to join the dogpile, but then he sees Dad emerge from the pond dragging the drowned boy, mouth stretched in a silent scream, skin blistered and bubbling.

Behind Dad, the algae-choked water rises like leavening bread, like a prismatic wave. The blob crashes on Dad and carries him across the ballfield, an adjacent street, a belt of woods, then into a saltwater marsh where Jimmy can’t follow. The toxin-induced sense of shared thought, of connection, fades, for which Jimmy grieves.

Dad disappeared. No one else at the chaotic scene reported seeing the wave-creature, and Jimmy knew people would attribute his story to hallucinations. He’s been ferrying ecologists through Cape waters since he got his boat, hoping to find the creature and relive the “evolutionary wavelength that’s millions of years old.” Somewhere in “that near-infinite chain,” he believes he’ll find his father.

Jimmy invites Heidi to come the next day on a charter he’s running. She accepts. After driving by her parents’ former house, she starts home. Approaching the Sagamore bridge, she finds traffic slowed to a crawl. She crawls with it, replaying her recorded interview. In the part where she tells Jimmy about Ty, she hears something in her voice that makes her voice-text her “complicated” roommate and make plans for dinner that night.

It turns out traffic was slow because the Sagamore Bridge has been closed. Police cars guard the area. She’s forced to head back toward the Bourne Bridge. There’s a weird smell in the air, a weird taste in her throat. Traffic in both directions is molasses, and she gets a panicky trapped-animal feeling. The car in front of her abruptly brakes. She barely stops in time to avoid a collision. Then, in her rearview mirror, she sees the Sagamore Bridge. Something green, then purple, rises like a huge fin, a cresting wave, to crash onto the structure…

Libronomicon: Heidi writes for the Boston Globe, which definitely wants their story about Cape Cod’s algal blooms to focus on one guy’s dubious memories from 1983. Her research draws on library microfiche records from the Cape Cod Times.

Young Jimmy is enamored of Bernie Wrightson’s Swamp Thing, a series about a guy whose body has been replaced by swamp flora. (I highly recommend Alan Moore’s trippier 80s reboot.)

Madness Takes Its Toll: Don’t worry, all of this is just a hallucination due to algal neurotoxins. No problem at all. No need to contact Arkham Asylum.

Anne’s Commentary

A few years ago, I used to vacation every summer on Cape Cod. From our rental house in Harwich, ALL the waters were within a ten minute drive, or if you wanted a frigid bath in the Atlantic, a thirty minute drive east. To the north was Cape Cod Bay, to the south Nantucket Sound. The Bass and Parker’s Rivers were one town to the west, and in all directions were the freshwater ponds, including the deep-bellied ones called kettles. I love saltwater, but sometimes you’ve had enough battering in the surf and crave calmer waters. Driving one day from Harwich to Brewster, I discovered my heart’s-delight of a kettle.

Seymour Pond is shared by the two towns, which divide it across the middle. The pond waters don’t recognize the boundary, nor do the perch, sunfish, bass, bullheads, pickerel and eels that boldly cross that invisible, intangible line. You can swim across Seymour and back during a morning workout, no problem. There is a big drop-off that unnerves some, plunging from neck-deep water to depths chill and unknown (all right, about forty feet at its deepest.) Not that forty feet isn’t enough to hide—things. Those eels if nothing worse. Woods crowd at the pond margins to drink. There are few houses, and no motorcraft are allowed. The Harwich-side beach has both sun and shade provided by longleaf pines, no umbrellas required for those who don’t want to broil. There’s parking for 10-12 cars max. I don’t begrudge cyclists from the adjacent bike trail their blissful plunges—they’ve earned them.

I never encountered a HAB (Harmful Algae Bloom) at Seymour Pond, but it’s been a while. The Association to Preserve Cape Cod reports on cyanobacteria activity. The most recent sampling at Seymour (June 11, 2025) notes the evil algae status as “Acceptable” (APCC’s best rating). It also notes that “No scum was observed.”

No observable scum is always a good thing. However, on May 28 and June 4, there was “Potential for Concern.” You can never turn your back on the evil algae.

That’s the second time I’ve labelled algae “evil.” I apologize to the scum. As Ian Stewart and Ian R. Falconer point out in Oceans and Human Health, Chapter 15:

There’s no scoffing at such success, and what aerobic-metabolizing or photosynthesizing organism with cells that have a membrane-bound nucleus can fail to be grateful to the cyanobacteria for making its existence possible? Also for keeping those carbon and nitrogen balances in good order. But there’s always a “but.” Stewart and Falconer go on to acknowledge that:

Tremblay uses this aspect of cyanobacteria to horrifying effect in the climax of Jimmy Lang’s narration. The effects of dermal contact are swift and nasty; ingesting their toxins raises havoc in the gastrointestinal tract, inhaling them raises havoc in the lungs. Heavy blooms can create an airborne miasma that triggers neurological symptoms, including the hallucinations in Jimmy’s account. Hallucinations can occur in cyanobacterial intoxication, but I haven’t found any reference to a 1983 HAB catastrophe at the Orleans ballpark. That appears to be Tremblay’s invention.

As far as young Jimmy knew, he was the only one who saw the wave-creature engulf his father. Heidi will have gleaned from her research that no one attending the ill-fated game reported such a phenomenon, including Jimmy, lest he land in an asylum like the ones in his comic books. Yet adult Jimmy still believes that his experience was, if not real, then certainly true, hallucination or not. Maybe the bloom’s toxins “amplified or enabled” the “shared or connected animal thought” between Jimmy and the other victims, particularly his father. This would have been another cyanobacterial gift to go with that ancient one of an oxygenated atmosphere. He wants to be “made into an antenna again,” to be “connected or reconnected to that evolutionary wavelength,” because “somewhere in that signal, in that near-infinite chain,” he’ll find his father again.

I wonder if Jimmy has gathered from his algae-hunting charters that the creature may be about to rise again. Maybe he invites Heidi on the next day’s charter so she can share in its triumphant return. Probably she witnesses that before he does, along with the other drivers trying to get the hell off the Cape via the Sagamore Bridge.

Having been one of those traffic-jammed drivers, I empathize with Heidi’s trapped animal panic. It’s the scariest part of the story for me, especially after remembering how many weird odors I used to smell along the endless canal-side creep.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

I grew up on Cape Cod—in Orleans, in fact—and have many happy memories of baseball games at Eldridge Park. I was never especially interested in the game, but enjoyed the relaxed spread of picnicking spectators along the grassy terrace, the smell of popcorn, the crack of bat against ball, and the opportunity to get rare ice cream truck treats and then wander over to the playground.

I was therefore slightly and unnecessarily distracted by things like the shortened distance between pond and field, and the wild notion of anyone expecting decent traffic over the bridges in summer. This is Weird Cape Cod (Eldritch Eldridge?), where trees and fences don’t block the route between Boland Pond and baseball field, tourist crowds don’t create a permanent traffic jam over the canal, and The Blob occasionally emerges from the algae. Am I a bad Cape Codder if I’m not sure which universe has the worse deal?

On Weird Cape Cod, where we set our tale, the central story focuses on 1983, and an iffily documented outbreak of a Dramatic Algal Bloom (a DAB, one step up from the more usual HAB or Hazardous Algal Bloom). In classic weird fashion, the story is told by a survivor to the frame-story interviewer, herself about to move unwillingly from observer to participant. Both framing and central stories set the intervening monster as an interruption to an uncertain relationship.

Jimmy is at his baseball game in the first place because of his fraught relationship with his father, who for once has asked instead of demanded his participation in said father’s baseball obsession. Dad fails at parenting, but is almost successful at rescuing a drowning boy—and is then swamped by the Blob and pulled into its wormy hive mind. Jimmy’s got a serious case of attraction-repulsion to that hive mind, which offers a connection to his father that he never experienced in their individual lives. Now, he identifies with Ahab—but an Ahab who maybe wants the whale to finish eating him.

Heidi is trying to decide what to do about a mutual attraction with her BFF housemate, or perhaps trying to avoid deciding. Thus the human interest piece on climate change and blobstalgia, a journalistic choice that’s between her and her editors. It gives her brain something to distract it, anyway, while coming to (I assume) the obvious conclusion about dating her housemate. Unfortunately for her relationship status, blobs are back, baby, and they’re bigger than ever!

This isn’t a story with a lot of answers. The biggest open question is not “What happens after the blob eats the Sagamore Bridge?”, which is tolerably obvious, but “What’s up with Jimmy’s possibly-imaginary wife?” Has he made her up to feel, or appear, less lonely? Have other people ignored her existence because she doesn’t fit their “weird old conspiracy theorist” scripts? Is she a toxic-fog-generated hallucination? If there are clues, I’m missing them.

What happens after the blob eats the Sagamore Bridge, naturally, is that tourists are blocked from visiting the Cape all summer, ruining the local economy but otherwise making everyone very happy.

Next week, someone continues to overstay her welcome in Chapters 29-35 of The Night Guest.