Grief, like lichen, clings to the body long after the first wound has scabbed over. In Green Fuse Burning, Tiffany Morris carves open the quiet violence of survival — the gnawing hunger for connection, the bone-deep estrangement from land and language, and the unbearable stillness of a world that refuses to mourn with you.

Rita, a Mi’kmaw artist adrift after her father’s death, seeks refuge at an isolated cabin where the woods seem to breathe with their own kind of grief. Haunted by her faltering grasp of her ancestral language and a girlfriend whose care often feels more like betrayal, Rita’s days blur under the twin weights of memory and loneliness. Her desire to consume the wild foliage around her reads not as madness but as a desperate ache to rejoin something that has always been slipping from her fingers.

Morris threads eco-horror through the novella with a deft, almost imperceptible hand: a pond that thrums with uncanny life, a lichen woman glimpsed in dreams and reflections. These elements are not mere metaphors but living, rotting testaments to the cost of our disconnection — from each other, from the Earth, from the inevitability of death. Nature, in Green Fuse Burning, is not a backdrop but a witness. It does not judge Rita; it absorbs her sorrow wordlessly, recognizes her as kin.

While the novella’s pacing sometimes wavers, the emotional depth never does. Morris writes Rita’s struggle with an aching honesty — neither glorifying nor pathologizing her — and the result is a story that feels profoundly human. Tender, unflinching, and defiantly rooted in Indigenous and ecological grief, Green Fuse Burning asks what it means to live in a dying world, and what small mercies might be found in refusing to look away.

📖 Recommended For: Readers who love eco-horror with emotional depth, Indigenous-centered storytelling, and haunting explorations of grief and belonging.

🔑 Key Themes: Grief and Cultural Disconnection, Ecological Horror and Climate Crisis, Colonial Trauma, Death and Rebirth through the Natural World.