Book Summary and Reviews of They Bloom at Night by Trang Thanh Tran

They Bloom at Night by Trang Thanh Tran

They Bloom at Night

by Trang Thanh Tran

  • Critics' Consensus (5):
  • Published:
  • Mar 2025, 272 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

The author of the New York Times bestselling horror phenomenon She Is a Haunting is back with a novel about the monsters that swim beneath us ... and live within us.

Since the hurricane, the town of Mercy, Louisiana has been overtaken by a strange red algae bloom. Noon and her mother have carved out a life in the wreckage, trawling for the mutated wildlife that lurks in the water and trading it to the corrupt harbormaster. When she's focused on survival, Noon doesn't have to cope with what happened to her at the Cove or the monster itching at her skin.

Mercy has never been a safe place, but it's getting worse. People are disappearing, and the only clues as to why are whispers of underwater shadows and warnings to never answer the knocks at night. When the harbormaster demands she capture the creature that's been drowning residents, Noon finds a reluctant ally in his daughter Covey. And as the next storm approaches, the two set off to find what's haunting Mercy. After all, Noon is no stranger to monsters ...

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Contrasts the disturbing with the beauty of human connection... . A moving contemplation on queerness and gender identity, the immigrant experience, and moving beyond survival to fight back against oppressors." ―Booklist (starred review)

"A strange and grisly tale of what we can survive to get closer to our truest selves, deeply infused with Vietnamese cultural concepts." ―School Library Journal (starred review)

"Tran fills the pages with sensory detail, creating a haunting setting that immerses readers in their worldbuilding. Noon is a complex and multifaceted protagonist, whose reckoning with trauma and selfhood (especially gender identity and Vietnamese ancestry) is the emotional center anchoring the extraordinary plot events." ―Kirkus Reviews

"Gorgeous, gruesome, and fiercely cathartic, They Bloom at Night is body horror with a beating heart." ―Rebecca Mahoney, author of The Valley and the Flood and The Memory Eater

"A briny, rotting ode to the things we must become to survive and the things we yearn to become when the surviving is over. In elegant, atmospheric prose, Trang Thanh Tran peels back layers of salty skin and sea foam to expose the truth: even when we are wrong, even when we are monstrous, we are whole." ―Courtney Gould, award-winning author of The Dead and the Dark

This information about They Bloom at Night was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Trang Thanh Tran Author Biography

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