The Marigold

Thank you, ECW Press, for allowing me to read The Marigold early"

Terrifyingly good. I devoured it.

Thank you NetGalley for providing an ARCof this book.

The beautiful and intriguing cover is what initially drew my attention to this novel, but the original and well-developed story is what kept me enraptured throughout my reading. I really loved how this story was told through the various individual perspectives, meaning we saw The Wet from every angle as the story progressed. I especially loved the small chapters of the inhabitants of the hotel! I felt these chapters really helped to give the reader more of an understanding of how The Wet behaved and how it preyed on people before the POV characters began to understand it themselves. This was such an original idea and it was paced really well, nothing felt like it dragged on too much or was rushed. I will definitely be recommending this book to friends.

The Marigold is one of those books that will stick with you for a long time after reading... a must-read for fans of dystopian novels and eco-horror.

The plot: Set in the near future, the novel depicts a Toronto on the brink of collapse due to non-stop real estate development, anti-human corporations controlling everyday life, and environmental disaster. A mysterious new and tremendously powerful force called the Wet is slowly taking over the city by rotting infrastructure and claiming human victims. Several characters (a health inspector, a down-on-his luck man trying to pay his bills, and a teenaged girl) all share in the same quest to understand this force before it destroys the people and places they call home.

My perspective: Sullivan does well to develop a number of interesting characters - some we feel compelled to root for, and some we hope to see suffer miserably. The social commentary is biting - the author highlights the all-too-familiar themes of capitalist excess, the destruction of the planet we call home, and the anomie felt in an increasingly data-driven and "online" world. The writing of the novel is efficient with few wasted words and pacing that feels slow to start and accelerates rapidly toward the end of the book.

Thank you NetGalley and ECW Press for this ARC!

A wonderfully terrifying look life in tight places, skyrise life, but at next-level heights. I was truly on the edge of my seat.

What's most incredible about this novel, and its most entertaining aspect, is the minutely detailed narrative of its many characters' psyches, delving deeply and turning up, revealing to the sun and readers' eyes, their dark moldy secret obsessions, greed, hatred, biases, and many other flaws hidden underneath. In that way, they're similar to (as well as residents of) the eponymous ultra-skyscraper, the Marigold: ostensibly a building of good, widely-sought-after, luxury condos while secretly breeding an insidious biological terror, the Wet, underneath. In Sullivan's indelible, delightfully horrific tale, it's ALL coming out of the basement. Thanks to Netgalley and ECW Press for the DRC of this very entertaining, thought-provoking, well-written book, the best horror I've read since King's.