Overgrowth by Mira Grant

Humanity is overrated

One day, three-year old Anastasia Miller walked into the woods near her home and disappeared. Police and neighbors searched for her, but no-one could find any sign of her until she mysteriously returned home unharmed and informed her mother that she wasn’t Anastasia at all — but rather an extraterrestrial impersonator and a vanguard of a coming invasion of the planet.

Naturally, her mother assumes this fanciful assertion is just the product of her child’s youthful imagination — and at worst her way of coping with the trauma of being lost in the woods where who knows what happened to her…

The thing is, she’s telling the truth. And she keeps on telling it. Even as a thirty-year old working in customer service. Everyone knows her as the weirdo who claims to be from outer space. Most people dismiss her as a kook, some bully her. Only a precious few accept her outrageous claim.

Here’s what really happened: all those years ago, exploring the woods, Anastasia encountered an alien plant that had grown there, its seed having fallen to Earth, and it killed her, then it replicated her, and then the sentient plant lived its life as if it was her.

And she’s not alone. There are hundreds if not thousands of these fatal florae imitating their human victims all over the globe. All of them have the same compulsion as Anastasia to blurt out their true nature and to warn of the coming invasion. But no-one really believes them.

Then, one day, aliens hit the headlines around the world. Audio recorded from deep space is apparently a broadcast from an extraterrestrial life form. Aliens are real — and they’re coming this way. Suddenly nothing will ever be the same.

The invasion Anastasia warned she was a forerunner for has finally turned up.

Overgrowth is billed as a sci-fi horror novel, but for all the blood-drinking, terrifying creatures, and death that take root in its pages, in terms of true creepiness, it never bests the chilling opening chapters which focus on young Anastasia’s murder and rebirth. For most of its duration, the vibe is more of a Spielbergian sci-fi adventure. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

To me, Overgrowth is best considered existential horror because — in between evading dangerous federal authorities, being forced to team up with an alien-hating astronomer (as a kid she survived an encounter with a hostile herb and has held a grudge ever since), and coming face-to-face with the green spider monster that is her biological mother — Anastasia’s primary conflict is an internal one:

Is she more human or more alien?

When the shit hits the fan — which it very much does — to which side should she pledge her allegiance? Does she side with the Earthlings who never truly accepted her and who often outright shunned her, but who raised her, made her who she is, and who include all the people she loves? Or does she take the side of the intergalactic creatures that are her true kin — even though they want to harvest humanity in its entirety?

It’s a delicious dilemma, made all the richer by the body horror that progresses from the moment Anastasia first hears her true tribe’s message — we’re talking shedding skin, increasingly green pigmentation, and that aforementioned thirst for human blood.

Consistently engaging, entertaining, and always well told, Overgrowth was a bit of a different horror novel than I’ve read in a while and it was a refreshing change. There are certainly similarities to Gwen, In Green, and other reviews understandably namecheck Day of the Triffids and Little Shop of Horrors, but Overgrowth is uniquely its own thing. Ultimately, it’s the story of a lifelong outsider who is finally compelled to confront her true nature and the conflict this causes when her true nature is to kill all humans.

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