Natural Horror

[MagnusTC]

You're welcome : )
If you think of anything else (more contemporary fiction perhaps?), I'd be happy to know about it!

[G. S. Carnivals]

Thomas M. Disch's 1965 novel The Genocides may be of interest. It involves the invasion of Earth by giant vegetation. I read this many years ago, so I don't recall if the plants are actually sentient or not.

[MagnusTC]

I just ordered The Day of the Triffids, The Genocides, and Brian Aldiss' Hothouse which also seemed related in theme. Another discovery was this amazing passage from Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher:

"I well remember that suggestions arising from this ballad led us into a train of thought wherein there became manifest an opinion of Usher's which I mention not so much on account of its novelty (for other men have thought thus), as on account of the pertinacity with which he maintained it. This opinion, in its general form, was that of the sentience of all vegetable things. But, in his disordered fancy, the idea had assumed a more daring character, and trespassed, under certain conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganization. I lack words to express the full extent, or the earnest abandon of his persuasion. The belief, however, was connected (as I have previously hinted) with the gray stones of the home of his fore-fathers. The conditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones - in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around - above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn. Its evidence - the evidence of the sentience - was to be seen, he said (and I here started as he spoke), in the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls. The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent, yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family, and which made him what I now saw him - what he was. Such opinions need no comment, and I will make none."

[gveranon]

Daniel Ausema's "Tree Ring Anthology" (in The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies, edited by D. F. Lewis) is probably exactly the sort of thing you're looking for. The rings of a tree do tell a tale -- an anthology of tales -- of the horrors that have been inflicted on it over the years. And eventually . . .

[Dr. Valzer]

If it's not too gauche to suggest it, my own novella Primeval Wood would fit this category.

Richard

[Knygathin]

Here are some short stories and novels, more fantasy than horror, depending on how your mind interprets it. Sentient plants, strange humanoid admixtures, and plants manipulated into housing and tools:

"The Demon of the Flower" and "The Flower-Women" by Clark Ashton Smith.
The Star King, The Houses of Iszm, and Maske: Thaery by Jack Vance.

[Knygathin]

Flower Phantoms by Ronald Fraser.

I received a new paperback edition, with a nice waxy texture to the cover like Rhododendron leaf.
Mark Valentine has read it, but has anyone else?

[MTC]

Nice that this thread isn't totally dead. I'm reading Ramsey Campbell's The Darkest Part of the Woods, it also borders on this category I feel. And it's really good!

[njhorror]

Quote Originally Posted by Dr. Valzer

If it's not too gauche to suggest it, my own novella Primeval Wood would fit this category. Richard

This seems to be scarce. I can't find a copy anywhere.


Nevermind, I ordered it directly from Burning Effigy.