Synopsis
A fresh start for a marriage tested in more ways than one. An old house that has lurked, empty and bare, for decades after being deemed inhospitable. A husband who only has his eye set on one prize. A wife who’s not sure she still wants what was once their shared dream.
A new place, an old wound, a fractured dream, a sinister presence, a living enemy…
A strange B-movie romp through the expectations of being a woman.
Review
Few things satisfy the soul as neatly as a quick and nasty bit of natural horror, and Ali Seay’s Inhospitable certainly does satisfy. As for what what the titular inhospitableness refers to, oh let us count the ways, dear reader.
Bristol and her husband, Jace, have just moved out of the city and into a long-dormant fixer-upper farmhouse that’s been left abandoned by its previous owners for decades. Thanks to a distant relative looking to unload the house for cheap, Jace was able to buy the property for a steal, and right away even those who don’t count themselves as a well-read horror fan will be seeing the red flags here, well before a strange neighbor pops up with ominous warnings to scare them away.
The home’s previous owners didn’t just up and walk away from an underwater mortgage — oh no, no, no, no, they went missing with a capital-M. The land the house is built on isn’t just cursed, it’s alive, and the greenery that’s taken over the walls and roof of the barn is alive in ways that no vine should be. We’re talking real man-eaters here, thick, nearly-sentient, The Ruins-style carnivorous plants.
How these plants came to be is the stuff of local legend and rumors. Nobody really knows the backstory, and none of that really matters anyway. Whatever happened in the past is a moot point. Bristol and Jace are here in the present and have to deal with it, or die trying.
The only problem is, their marriage is fractured beyond repair. Jace wants babies, Bristol maybe doesn’t, and to top it all off, Jace is having an affair, which Bristol is wise to. All of which adds up to a whole lot of inhospitablity, inside and outside their new home.
Seay mines away at the interpersonal conflicts between Bristol and her spineless, selfish, idiot husband to keep the tension high, and then ratchets that up further with some wicked body horror. The vines aren’t content to just eat any old random passerby or local wildlife. They need a host, and a scorned, vengeful wife with a barren womb certainly does fit the bill awfully nicely… And Jace, well, the guy sure looks like plant food to me!
Inhospitable packs in a broad array of themes and topics over its too-brief 160+ pages, from child death and failed pregnancies to toxic men and broken marriages, not to mention the violent supremacy of Mother Nature. Seay covers a lot of ground, but I found myself wanting more, particularly when the story veers toward Good For Her territory as Bristol embraces her rage and finds some natural outlets for her anger. Still, I couldn’t help but wish for an extra chapter or two of the old ultraviolence, just for cathartic good measure, and to deliver more fully on the promise of threats offered.
That said, Inhospitable works well enough as it is, for what it is. That I wanted more pages is a compliment to Seay more than a complaint of dissatisfaction. I’ve been reading Seay fairly regularly since her savagely violent serial killer meet-cute horror romp, Go Down Hard, at the start of the decade and have found her to be an easy go-to author for works that are consistently satisfying. Couple that with how much of a sucker I am for this breed of horror and Seay’s messaging here, it’s hard to be too upset at how quickly it all flies.
Seay takes a lot of familiar tropes that are practically de rigueur for this kind of horror and smartly inverts them, presenting them through the lens of a hurt woman, toxic relationships, and the feminine urge to do lots and lots of body horror.
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