The Unfamiliar Garden by Benjamin Percy

The Unfamiliar Garden
By Benjamin Percy
Mariner Books, 2022

“The ground shook,” starts Benjamin Percy’s latest novel, The Unfamiliar Garden, 

Windows shattered. Grids of electricity went dark. Satellites shredded. Radio signals scrambled. Dogs howled and people screamed their prayers. Many of the meteors dissolved in the atmosphere, but many struck the earth, sizzling into the ocean, splintering roofs, searing through ice, punching craters into fields and forests and mountainsides, like the seeds of the night.

“It was then,” the passage continues portentously, “that everything changed.” 

The world changes, but so, more narrowly and more tangentially, does the life of Percy’s main characters, mycologist - fungi specialist - Jack Abernathy, his wife Nora, a police detective, and their little daughter Mia, who’s so crashingly annoying, so Hollywood-poppet, in the book’s opening pages that readers will be praying for her to disappear even before she, rather promptly, does. 

This shatters Jack and Nora’s already-tense marriage, and the world is already likewise wounded, with meteor-prompted drought clamping down on the Pacific Northwest for years. When rain finally returns, it betokens the return of mushrooms and fungi as well – and something else, something otherworldly and possibly menacing, is flourishing right alongside them. What follows unfolds like a combination of Scott Smith’s The Ruins and Little Shop of Horrors, and readers who are already familiar with the signature brand of highbrow creepiness Percy showed in Red Moon and The Wilding will have a juicy anticipation of what’s coming:

It is hard to know what to call them, tendrils or roots or tentacles, but they run across the floor and along the counters and on parts of the walls and ceiling. They are of varying length and thickness. They split and split again and then somehow seem to thread back together. The skin of them has a slimy pallor. Here and there he notes a kind of broccoli bloom, a tumorous sprout knuckling upward. And when he looks closer, he thinks he sees a bent arm here, a long-toed foot there, a knobby knee, a screaming mouth, the glossy sheen of an eye.

As such passages make clear, readers shouldn’t be fooled by the incredibly boring title of Percy’s book or by its incredibly boring cover design. This is hardly a boring book, even though its author virtually never denies himself wonky digressions:

When you breathe, you’re allowing something inside of you. An intimacy equivalent to sex. The average adult inhales and exhales eight liters of air every minute. That’s around eleven thousand liters of air a day. Only 20 percent of this is oxygen. The rest is made up of gases, smoke, pollen, fungal spores, and microbial organisms recklessly ingested. Can you imagine chugging four big soda bottles full of toilet water every minute?

It’s downright cruel to dangle a line like that last one in front of a book reviewer, but in this case, it’s going to have to go unused. The Returned Package, er, no, The Full Closet, no, no, The Unfamiliar Garden carries the freight of its nerdy passions very lightly, and always in the service of some genuinely touching human drama.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.