Synopsis:
During a grocery run to her local shopping center, Shell Pine sees a ‘HELP NEEDED’ sign in a flower shop window. She’s just left her fiancé, lost her job, and moved home to her parents’ house. She has to make a change and bring some good into her life, so she goes inside and takes a chance. Shell realizes right away that flowers are just the good thing she’s been looking for, as is Neve, the beautiful florist who wrote the sign asking for help. The thing is, Neve needs help more than Shell could possibly imagine.
An orchid growing out of sight in the heart of the mall is watching them closely. His name is Baby, and the beautiful florist belongs to him. He’s young, he’s hungry, and he’ll do just about anything to make sure he can keep growing big and strong. Nothing he eats – nobody he eats – can satisfy him, except the thing he most desires. Neve. He adores her and wants to consume her, and will stop at nothing to eat the one he loves.
This is a story about possession, and monstrosity, and working retail. It is about hunger and desire, and other terrible things that grow.
Review:
Stephen King’s “Needful Things,” turns botanical in this rich and indulgent tale of secrecy, temptation and obsession. I found myself slightly bemused, but also pretty scared of Griffin’s ill-intentioned flora and fauna, and gushing over her border-line seductive prose, which only enhances the bloody and suspenseful eco-system she cultivates. Full of perfumed rot and blooming menace, “Eat The Ones You Love,” will trip you with its thick, dark roots, before comforting you with curling vines… which tighten gradually. A novel that you will devour, careful this one doesn’t devour you right on back. “Eat The Ones You Love,” will lure you in and ensnare you before swallowing you whole, and should you want to offer yourself up to it, it’s out in the UK on June 3rd from Titan Books, and April 22nd from Tor elsewhere.
Shell’s life has slowly wilted. She’s moved back in with mum and dad after her long-term relationship came to a messy end, and is out of a job. She is stuck in a full-time limbo of ignoring WhatsApp’d brunch invitations and doom-scrolling engagement photos and baby pics. Things improve when she gets a job at a florist in the Woodbine Crown Mall. The mall at 4AM is magical, the work is peaceful and the flowers are lovely. Lovelier still is Neve, the owner, who hires Shell as her assistant. The two treasure each other’s company, and before long Shell finds that she is friends with Neve’s friends. What she may not know is that we aren’t the only ones watching their romance blossom. At the centre of it all grows an orchid named Baby, and Neve would do almost anything to keep him fed.
This is a story about eco-systems. Love and co-dependence, symbiosis and control. When Shell responds to the “Help Needed,” sign Neve puts out, she enters into something far more intricate and intense than a simple working relationship. Neve gets Shell’s admiration, loyalty and presence, and in return is given purpose, validation, and a whole social circle. Hungry, omniscient plant aside, they need each other, and seem to sustain each other the same way that thirsty roots and soil do. Of course, if Neve and Shell’s relationship is the tender, beating heart of the novel, Baby is its rumbling stomach. Neve and Baby’s strange relationship examines a more primal and dangerous form of love, one that examines the line between caretaker and captive, devotion and obsession, love and servitude. Baby literally needs Neve to nurture him, feed him, or at the very least clear up after him, but Neve needs him just as much. So what is it to be hungry? What is nourishment? Well, it’s love.
This theme of interdependence extends outward and curls its tendrils throughout the entire Woodbine Crown Mall, which is its own fragile eco-system. In a retail world ruled by online shopping, the Woodbine is struggling to stay alive. The shops that still stand rely not only on customers (support independent retailers where you can folks) but the support of their neighbours. The camaraderie and shared resilience of other owners and employees trying to stave off extinction. Fragile links in a delicate chain, one store closing its doors is not an individual failure, but one which weakens the whole structure. It’s a sad reality. The decline of the mall, or more broadly, experiential retail is not dramatic or sudden, but a gradual starvation. It’s more than the death of shopping, for so many it’s the loss of interacting with customers, the loss of thousands of first jobs, the loss of purpose and responsibility and something to get out of bed for. It won’t be long before there’s nothing left but flickering lights, empty corridors and clearance sales, and I don’t know about you, but that makes me very sad.
“Eat The Ones You Love,” by Sarah Maria Griffin is a rich and lyrical mediation on what it means to love and be loved. In my reviews I often refer to the dark core, or festering heart or whatever of a book, but here the depravity, the nastiness, the rot, is on the outside. The “heart,” of this novel is an alive and beating one.
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