Jo, a foreign exchange student from Norway, moves to Australia to study biology at a university. She’s a shy and socially awkward young lady looking for a place to live while studying abroad. Things seem to look up when Carral answers her call for a roommate, giving her a place to live on the outskirts of town at an old brewery turned into housing. But the brewery is a strange place that has an unsettling effect on the people living there. Soon, Jo’s sense of reality becomes blurred and overwhelmed.
While there isn’t much to the plot, the language does provoke a visceral reaction. The descriptions of hypersensitivity as the protagonist begins to hear, taste, smell and feel things that should be imperceptible make the skin crawl. And of course, it had mushrooms, which always makes for weird and fascinating horror.
Throughout the grotesque horror, Jo experiences moments of inexplicable attraction to Carral. The relationship becomes increasingly toxic as the roommates bond over their shared strangeness. It is akin to that of the fungi and mushrooms that Jo studies in biology, which are growing in their apartment. It’s a relationship in which one entity begins to take over another as Carral does to Jo. But the sapphic story itself felt like an afterthought. I wanted there to be more of that somehow—not necessarily a romance, because that’s not what this book is, but it just felt like it got tacked on.
An intruder to their world, Pym, a new neighbor, creates confusion between them. He forces his sexual advancements on them, leaving them with gaps in their memories. It plays out as a fantasy horror, but it reads like a human coping mechanism of repressing what they don’t want to remember.
Overall, Paradise Rot reminded me of Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching. It disturbs and upsets the senses with its horrific atmosphere. But as a story with plot and character development, it lacks a little more substance.
Content warning: sexual assault
