Bloom by Delilah S. Dawson
(Titan Books, 2023)
Reviewed by Harry Slater
The forbidden basement has always been the horror genre’s most heavy-handed metaphor. Beneath the above-ground facade lurks a horrifying truth that the antagonist is trying to hide; plumb the depths of their psyche and you’ll discover severed limbs, swinging rusty chains, fluids of unspeakable origin.
There are interesting ways to handle this trope, avenues that can be explored that shift the expectation of the reader. Or it can be tossed at them like a lump of heavy flesh, subtle as a cleaver. Bloom, by New York Times bestselling author Delilah S. Dawson, is a twee romance that stumbles towards its inevitable subterranean bloodbath with a lazy gait, never really seeding the horror it intends to unleash, and once it arrives delivering it with an unsatisfying squelch instead of a glorious arterial spray.
The novella focuses on Ro—Rosemary—an assistant professor who finds herself newly single in a small town after the breakup of a long term relationship. Into her dreary days comes Ash, an elfin, artisan cupcake maker who sparks something in the dowdy Ro. This realisation of sexuality is handled in a clumsy, haphazard way. Ro has never had so much as an inclination that she might be attracted to women, but she gets fed a cupcake and falls in love with one. It doesn’t ring true, as anyone who’s ever had to struggle with their sexual identity would attest to. Here, a switch flips and Ro barrels head-on into an obsessive relationship.
As that relationship grows, Ash kills a raccoon with a spade, violently confronts a peeping tom, and tells Ro that there’s a door in her house that she must never, ever go through. As a character, Ro feels like an amalgam of disparate ideas. She’s obsessed with classic literature, but makes constant references to pop-culture; she mostly reads but doesn’t know how to talk to someone who doesn’t watch TV. It seems like she’s defined by her relationships with others, all of them failed, a cypher for modern loneliness and the search for magic and meaning. Ash makes cupcakes and is guarded and lithe and sometimes bites her bottom lip. The prose bumbles along for the most part, soft and inoffensive but never managing to capture the full force of Ro’s sudden obsession; all breathy sighs and quivering where it feels like it should be more confused, desperate, passionate.
The food that Ash lavishes on Ro—the cupcakes and meats and cheeses and breads—are given most of the descriptive legwork, for reasons that become clear as the story reaches its conclusion. It’s interesting to read a book with taste as its main sensation, but it also feels periphery, a riff on an idea that needed fleshing out into something more substantial. Ro enters Ash’s world, a quaint house on the edge of nowhere, a kitchen garden filled with enticing plants, chickens pottering around, fluffy white towels. Ash is in turns filled with an almost dreamlike loveliness, or defensive and closed off, that pendulum swing of excitement and heartbreak that defines an abusive relationship. You know something horrible is going to happen, but the tension never really builds beyond ‘does this person actually like me?’ The ending, when it arrives, is driven by a storm, and inevitably involves that forbidden door.
There’s a sense of disappointment to it all, as though something is missing; reading through the book you’re longing for something supernatural, some dark sorcery to explain away Ro’s behaviour. It doesn’t come. For all of its brutality, the climax is desperately mundane, a pedestrian end to a pedestrian book that doesn’t land in any telling way. By the last page you’re wondering what the message is. Better the abusive ex you know than the interesting girl at the farmers market? Don’t chase anything magical? Never trust anyone who uses lard in their cupcake recipe? Bloom doesn’t so much pull you kicking and screaming into its basement of terror, as it does walk you there down a dull, confusing, well-trodden path.
Review from BSFA Review 23 - Download your copy here.