Mungwort

by James Noll

Everything’s fresh on Lilith’s Farm. Especially the bodies.

Welcome to Spotsylvania, Virginia, a perfect place to raise a family. Unless you’re Cece Stone. Cece ran away from Spotsy a long time ago, choosing the life of the road dog over staying anywhere close to home. Tough and independent, she makes her living all over the country, picking strawberries in Salinas, pipe-fitting in Prudhoe, hauling lumber in Longview. But a mysterious postcard from home brings her back to Spotsy, specifically to Lilith's Farm. The work is hard and her bosses are jerks, but at least the food is good.

Then strange things start to happen. The fence that borders the farm seems like it's under attack from the forest. Toxic fungus balls keep popping up on the tree trunks. And one by one, her fellow workers go missing.

Anybody else would try to escape, but escape isn't possible. Besides, Cece's on a mission to find her missing father, and nothing, not the forest, not the fungus balls, and certainly not her creepy bosses, will stop her.

Genres: Horror

277 pages, Paperback

Published October 26, 2021

About the author

James Noll has worked as a sandwich maker, a yogurt dispenser, a day care provider, a video store clerk, a day care provider (again), a summer camp counselor, a waiter, a prep. cook, a sandwich maker (again), a line cook, a security guard, a line cook (again), a waiter (again), a bartender, a librarian, and a teacher. Somewhere in there he played drums in punk rock bands, recorded several albums, and wrote dozens of short stories and a handful of novels.

Reviews

[Join the Penguin Resistance! · Rating 5 out of 5]

So excellent! This novel has it all. The blurb captivated me at the mention of "toxic fungus," and I immediately leaped into this maelstrom of Horror, contemporary Science Fiction, Mad Science a la Dr. Moreau, Conspiracy, profit-mongering, and a total disregard for human life that surpasses even that of wild animals or Zombies. Racism, sexism, body-shaming, migrant captivity, suspense ratcheted to the very highest level possible without suffering aneurysm: this is a non-stop bullet-train race with multiple empowered female characters who find themselves being the rescuers of innocent foolish males (what a nontraditional reversal!)


Like David Koepp's fungal COLD STORAGE, undoubtedly I'll return to MUNGWORT again and again.

[Billie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brilliant read.
Wonderful well written plot and story line that had me engaged from the start.
Love the well fleshed out characters and found them believable.
Great suspense and found myself second guessing every thought I had continuously.
Can't wait to read what the author brings out next.
Recommend reading.

I read a complimentary advance copy of the book; this is my voluntary and honest review.

[Merry Chapman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The protagonist, Cece Stone received a post card from her father and she sets out to find him, living on the road working as she goes, when a female trucker who offers her a ride after she beat and angered a patron in the diner she stopped at. Seeing him come after her, she reluctantly accepts the ride from the trucker who applauds Cece's independence. But taking her to the next stop or town was not in the cards. The trucker dons a gas mask and lets gas loose in the truck on Cece. The next thing she knows she has been deposited to Lilith's work farm where she is put to work. The work is very hard, but she does what she is told. But there is a toxic fungus that keeps attaching to the trees and fences on the farm that Cece and crew have to keep cutting even as it continues to grow. Strange. To add to this mystery her fellow workers seem to be disappearing. Something strange is going on, but Cece still is desperate to find her father and nothing will stop her, or so she thinks. This is a very different story that adds humor here and there which lightens the mood. Lots of crazy twists and turns and surprises especially in the end. I received and ARC of this book but the opinions expressed here are strictly my own.

[Jasmine Edris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book! The story was fabulous, everything from murder, to weird science lab experimentation, to lovecraftian horrors but the dialogue was hard to follow most of the time and the ending for me was a bit anti-climactic.

[Robin Ginther-Venneri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mungwort
by James Noll

Everything’s fresh on Lilith’s Farm. Especially the bodies.
Welcome to Spotsylvania, Virginia, a perfect place to raise a family. Unless you’re Cece Stone. Cece ran away from Spotsy a long time ago, choosing the life of the road dog overstaying anywhere close to home. Tough and independent, she makes her living all over the country, picking strawberries in Salinas, pipefitting in Prudhoe, hauling lumber in Longview. But a mysterious postcard from home brings her back to Spotsy, specifically to Lilith's Farm. The work is hard, and her bosses are jerks, but at least the food is good.

An interesting story. Descriptive and entertaining. Easy to read and kind of gross visions of farm life.

[Erin Slezak · Rating 4 out of 5]

*4.5 stars*

Hooray I finished a book! Oh my GOD it’s been a minute.

This was a very cool book to break my reading slump on. It’s a little over 200 pages but the detail and plot feel so much richer than that, I think it was the perfect length.
The characters were very detailed and realized, all with flaws and distinct personalities. The dialogue really shines in this book as well as the detail writing. It’s horror and graphic but doesn’t get so wrapped up in description that you forget where you are which I feel can happen with other horror writers.

What really brought me in to this was the idea of nature and plants acting as monsters in the book and if that piqued your interest then you will definitely be fascinated with this book. It is so original and interesting, it reminds me of a combination of Midsommar mixed with Stephen King mixed with Brain Camp.

My only critique is with a couple of the plot points that feel like they took a little too long to establish themselves, mostly with Cece’s motive of being on Lilith’s farm. But while that was withheld for a while, it didn’t really impede my enjoyment of the book.

I’d say if you read the book blurb and are intrigued, definitely pick it up because it won’t let you down.

[Trish · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like mungwort itself; fascinating but frustrating...

Forest (and by extension, nature) horror is my jam. So when Mungwort and I crossed paths, the promise of evil woods and toxic fungus was too promising to pass up.

First the good. James Noll writes a mean description, and in the most horrific parts of the book, he’s clearly in his element. The mungwort grows more and more sinister, and in action sequences, the writing is confident, brisk, and appropriately gooey. (Kudos especially for some deft work involving rusty bedsprings - those visuals are going to stick with me for a while.) In short, we have all the ingredients for a smorgasbord of bio and body horror - excellent!

But, greedy reader that I am, I wanted more of it. Just when the story got good n’ gloppy, the scene would end, plunging me back into a morass of characters that I struggled to tell apart. Cece and Harlow, for example, as tough-girl archetypes, sounded extremely similar on the page. There was also little to distinguish Cece’s co-workers, so when someone went missing, it was hard to muster up too much concern over their fate. Few of the non-villains merited much physical description, although, point in James Noll’s favor, the bad guys were described in monstrous detail.

This story felt like it had a few too many plot points and not enough space to really flesh them out, so to speak. Interesting concepts, such as Cece’s association with someone who initially seemed antagonistic, petered out to nothing. I can’t seem to piece together why Cece didn’t just call the police, especially not when she had a sporadically-working cell phone. I also wish that I had learned about the villain’s goals earlier in the plot; it would have given Cece’s story more motivation and scope. Half the final chapter felt like a sequel packed into a handful of pages; there was definitely enough material to set up the revenge story that James Noll seemed to want to write. Overall, a developmental editor or alpha reader could have significantly tightened up the plot.

However, none of this is to say that I didn’t enjoy the story when it got into the horror and started spurting pollen and blood all over the place. That’s what I came for, and that’s what the author delivered. When he was deep in the guts of a horrific scene or caught in the bowels of artful description, his artistry as a writer came to the fore.

From a proofreader’s standpoint, there was a skipped word here or there. The type was also justified for some reason, which put big gaps between words. But what made me crazy was that there were no breaks between scenes within chapters. One minute I was reading about Cece and ET in the hoop-house, and then in the next paragraph, Cece was describing the conversation she had with ET to Ben, with no break to let me know that we were now in the cafeteria. It made some parts of the book extremely confusing; hopefully, it was just a formatting error in the version I read.

Of note, Mungwort included the first chapter from James Noll’s book The Hive. I bring it up because some of the irregularities I noticed in Mungwort were not present in the sample from The Hive. The Hive also was written in first person, and the quippiness that fell flat in Mungwort worked very well in The Hive. I’m definitely interested to see what else James Noll can do; he’s a talented horror and action writer and his descriptions are excellent. The Hive went on my To Read list.

The bottom line: I recommend Mungwort for fans of bio and body horror. Come for the fungus and stay for the rusty bedsprings. 3.5 stars.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very original story indeed. A young woman, Cece, is sort of kidnapped and drugged with some sort of pollen, then taken to a labor camp. There are plenty of other workers at this camp, where the workers are tasked with cutting back some insanely fast growing trees and vines that encroach upon the property. That's all they do, and they seemingly don't question why. There is also a very odd vine called Mungwort that creates large blisters full of acid on the trees. Our protagonist, Cece, is searching for her missing father and realizes something is wrong. The owners of the property are using humans as some sort of fertilizer for freakish plant monsters. It's a pretty crazy story overall, but pretty fun.

[Ranjana · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good horror story

[Mia Ernsth Fomin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too much action, too little horror.