Thank you, NetGalley and Creature Publishing for the e-arc!

Let me start by saying that I don’t typically pick up on hidden meanings or metaphors in books, so there’s a good chance that this story carries deeper symbolism—perhaps about family—that I might have missed.

That said, I still thoroughly enjoyed the book. It’s well-written, strange, eerie, and deeply unsettling. If you prefer stories with clear resolutions, this might not be the book for you, as the ending leaves more questions than answers.
However, I believe the confusion is intentional—this is a fever dream of a story, designed to disorient and linger in your mind.

The narrative follows nine children whose names and ages remain unknown. Instead, they are referred to by nicknames like The Liar, The Crybaby, and so on. The point of view shifts between third-person and an unusual first-person plural, using “us” instead of “I,” which at times made me feel confused but in a good way.

There are elements of body horror, particularly involving (view spoiler), adding to the book’s unsettling atmosphere. While the plot is entirely different, I got similar vibes to The Haunting of Hill House (TV show)—not in story, but in tone and the sense of creeping unease.

This feels like a book that would offer a different experience on a second read, revealing new layers and details. Either way, I’m eager to read more from this author.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Let me begin by saying this book is a work of art, both the cover and the writing. As with any art piece, this book will not be for everyone. But for those weird/fever dream/surreal horror loving folks, I would recommend! Don't expect to understand everything, just go along for the ride!

I finished reading this a few hours ago and am still not sure what actually happened. For such a short novella, this one took a bit to get through. There were many times flipping back through pages saying, wait.... was that.... who? Not to say I had a bad time, but I was confused 100% of the way through. Does that matter? Nope! My weirdo heart enjoyed every strange second of it. It was creepy, odd, confusing, and most of all, beautiful.

If you're looking for a cerebral and interesting read about horror mushrooms, this is one of the best ones i've seen if not the only one. A great read!

Root Rot by Saskia Nislow is a gripping and eerie exploration of nature’s darker side. Nislow’s atmospheric writing builds a sense of creeping dread, drawing you into a world where the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural blur. With a chilling plot and richly developed characters, Root Rot is an unsettling and captivating read that lingers long after the last page.

I really wanted to love this book. The front cover and description intrigued me but I just couldn’t enjoy the book. It definitely is for a certain audience and they might enjoy it far more than I did.


Thank you for letting me read though!

The book’s cover caught my attention. Although it’s a relatively short book, it took me three days to finish. This is largely because this book can be defined as a weird fiction—a genre that I usually enjoy to read—but there are moments in books like Root Rot that challenge my ability to follow the plot easily.

The novel has a story around a group of children who, along with their parents, staying at a house inherited from their deceased ancestors, located on far away from the city.

The children's names are interesting: Crybaby, The Secret Keeper, The Liar... These unusual details set the tone for the unsettling and mysterious world they inhabit around them

The story is a mix of intersection of nature and magical realism, a supernatural where events often blur the line between reality and hallucination. like.. there’s a strange fusion of plant life and the human form, plants or mushrooms with soul, trees that look. like one of them... all those "forms" usually has kind a gloom and pain, only human beings can have...

and surreal happenings that intertwine the human beings with the natural world surrounding them.

The presence of family members—such as an elder who has passed away but is perceptibly still "present" at the dinner table—is one of the eeriest aspects. Similarly, there are moments when the children can sense their parents' faces but never actually see them—faces without features, familiar voices emerging from unfamiliar bodies. These elements contribute to the book’s eerie atmosphere, steeped in isolation and ambiguity.

While the plot can be a bit difficult to follow, Root Rot is undeniably a unique and compelling novel with a distinctive style. If you’re a fan of weird fiction, this book worth a read.

Thanks #Netgalley and publisher for the #ARC.

my instagram: karelervesayfalar

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC to review!
Rating (on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being excellent)
Quality of writing: 4
Pace: 4
Plot development: 3
Characters: 3
Enjoyability: 3
Ease of Reading: 3

Overall rating: 3 out of 5

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the digital galley in exchange for my honest review!

It was an atmospheric, gothic dreamscape of a novel. The interior content definitely matches the exterior! I was initially drawn in by the cover and was glad to find a creepy, disorienting and itchy story within. It was a surreal and very conceptual little bit size of a book (novella) that deals with themes that include familial expectations, gender, and legacy.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced e-copy of this book.

OK. So. What did I just read? I went into this completely blind, judging the book by its creepy-cool cover. It was weird. And eerie. And confusing. And like a rabid little fever-dream. The atmosphere was spooky, definitely giving gothic horror vibes as this group of nameless children wind up at their grandfather's lake house for a good ole time. But they start leaving pieces of themselves in the ground, in the mushrooms, in the wallpaper. And it eats at you because you can't remember who is who and who has been taken and who is maybe not all there. It flows in a nightmare fashion, dipping into scenes you might think are imagined. And then it creates this folktale monstrosity and it all kind of makes sense? But not really? Because you can't prove who knew what was happening or how it happened or who actually left. Weird and creepy and will probably make it's way into my dreams tonight.

Real rating: 3.5, because ambiguous endings make me itchy.

I found a lot to admire here, but I think I'm just not the right reader for it as I couldn't connect with it emotionally. I'd read another book by this author though.

This book is really different in the way the narrative is done and that is good and bad at the same time. I thought that the vagueness of the way the story is told, with its characters not having names just a kind of nickname like "the liar", "the young aunt", etc, was really interesting and probably the thing that I liked more about it. But, even with this, the story in itself did not attracted me and at the end of it I was "ah, ok". So in the end is probably just not a book for me but not a bad book because of it.

Thank you Netgalley and Creature Publishing for this eARC.

This is probably one of the best novellas I've ever read. I thought it did a really good job at capturing a very spooky and eerie vibe, especially the early scenes. There was one sort of jump between scenes that gave me a bit of whiplash near the end, maybe I wasn't paying enough attention but it felt like a very strange vibe switch for no reason but then quickly regained it's footing. I'm very excited to see what this author writes in the future!

I’m not really sure what I just read. It was definitely a fever dream. But it seemed so far out that I found myself reading the same thing over and over again to process what I was reading. It wasn’t holding my interest and I found myself zoning out. It took me 8 days to read this little novella! It was incredibly hard to follow the characters because no one had actual names. It was names like “Cry Baby”, “The One Who Ran Away”, “The Liar”, “Boy Twin”, etc. There were no chapters it just read as one continuous book with little breaks. It all blurred together. The beginning of new paragraphs were barely indented and when people talked nothing was in quotations instead it was italicized. It did however remind me a little bit of Annihilation and I loved that story. Definitely odd but there were a few genuinely disturbing moments towards the end.

Thanks netgally and creature for this eArc.

Nine children gather at their granfather's lakehouse-nameless but characters each. The liar. The secret keeper, the oldest, the one who runs away, the one with the beautiful voice, the crybaby, the twins, and the baby. Are sequestered together in the childrens wing foe the first time in years, paired off to bond and their parents are, reliving their youth and reconnecting. But as the family is gathered, stranger and stranger things start happening and slowly, each child is lost or replaced, becoming part of the unsettling landscape and the foundation of the house...and maybe the family?

I love a spooky little treat, but this book was not for me. The ambiance was great, and there was a sense of creeping dread in the beginning of the book i was VERY in to, but i then had a hard time keeping track of the characters through their actions but because their titles werent repeated enough in my opinion so that in the course of a conversation you forget who was talking to whom. Even in the climactic conversation of the story, where the reasonings are supposed to be revealed, i could barely remember who was speaking, and i had to read it more than twice to try to make sense of it. I still dont think i really have it... grateful for the arc but not my favorite.

this is a 3.75 rating, rounded up.

sometimes you take a gamble on a book with an amazing cover and are rewarded. it took me a while to get hooked, but this is such an interesting, eerie, dream of a novel, following nine children and their weekend spent at their grandfather's lake house, and all that unravels. the children being unnamed, instead being referred to by characteristics - The Liar, The Crybaby, The Girl/Boy Twin, The Baby - was a little confusing at first, but it was something i both got used to (some of their voices are more distinct than others) and accepted was kind of the point of it all, when paired with the narrator's omnipotent "we" voice; like some kind of dark fairytale, collecting dust on a grandparent's bookshelf.
horror in novel form is usually quite difficult for me to be unnerved by - i usually have difficulty picturing the grisly scenes being described - so i have to commend nislow's writing, as the meandering, unnerving tone instilled a sense of dread in me i couldn't shake, building up to a terrifying, incomprehensible crescendo. i adored their writing, and i'll definitely pick up anything they write next.
while i was admittedly confused by some of the imagery - and still am, in some aspects - i remember feeling an excitement about reading other people's reviews and interpretations of what themes and narratives root rot is plunging its hands into - family, expectations, and legacy, as well as bodily autonomy and gender, to name a few - which is always a good sign for a novel (well, novella).
i'll be thinking about this one for a long time. some of the imagery in here is going to stick with me. also, GOTTA respect any book that mentions the bleeding tooth fungus.

What a surreal novella. This reads like a fever dream. It’s definitely creepy, and there’s some seriously eerie and bizarre imagery. One scene in particular I found both fascinating and horrifying.

I found that for most of the time I struggled to keep the characters straight - they all have names such as ‘The Crybaby’ and ‘The One Who Runs Away’, but none are ever described so it felt like these vague names is really all they were.
It’s also unclear who the narrator is supposed to be - one of the children? All of them? None of them?

The ending… I feel like maybe I get the ending, so long as (like the things in the story) I don’t look directly at it. The event before the ending… I have no idea what that was all about.

I don’t know quite how to feel about Root Rot. I don’t know if I liked it, exactly, but I was fascinated by it and it’s beautifully written.
I think it’s one you really have to read and find out about for yourself.

My thanks to the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for the advance review copy.

I was expecting something else entirely when I picked this book up, but curiosity unfortunately got the best of me. To say this was a regrettable mistake is an understatement.

This is a very abstract horror novella, which is why I didn’t vibe with it at all. Regardless of such I did enjoy the gothic atmosphere and the prominence of nature and its overtaking of buildings throughout the entire story. We were able to see some incredible examples of body horror eco horror but I remained wholly unimpressed based on the lack of character depth, development and overall abstractness of the story.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for this advanced reader's copy and the opportunity to this early. Review has been posted on Waterstones and Amazon.

Root Rot is a horror novella that leans fully into the bizarre, delivering an eerie, disorienting experience that lingers long after the final page. Vague by design, the story unfolds in a way that keeps you constantly unsettled, pulling you deeper into inescapable unease.

I love how strange this book made me feel. There is something so compelling about horror that isn’t just frightening but deeply, deeply unnerving. It’s not an easy read, but exactly what makes it so impactful. There is clearly an underlying message waiting to be deciphered from this story about gender, society, and family dynamics that I will have to let marinate for a few days. If you enjoy horror that embraces the uncanny and forces you to sit with your discomfort, check out this debut on March 25, 2025.

Root Rot by Saskia Nislow is a haunting, dreamlike novella about nine children at their grandfather’s lake house. Each is known by titles like The Liar or The Secret Keeper, adding to the eerie atmosphere. Strange events unfold—mushrooms ooze blood, eyes blink unnaturally, and reality distorts.

Told from a collective “we” perspective, the story blurs the line between real and surreal, creating a creeping sense of dread. While its ambiguity may frustrate some, it invites deep interpretation. A chilling, thought-provoking read that lingers long after the final page.