There’s something immediately intriguing about the idea of a haunted mall, a cursed orchid, and a queer florist at the center of it all—but Eat the Ones You Love didn’t bloom the way I hoped it would.

We meet Shell at her breaking point—jobless, newly single, and back in her childhood bedroom. She’s adrift in a recession-shadowed town, her once-clear life plan unraveled. Enter Neve, cryptic and alluring, offering Shell both a job and a slow-burning invitation into a much stranger world. The novel roots itself in a decaying mall and an otherworldly plant with sharp teeth beneath soft petals. I wanted to love this story about monstrous love, eco-horror, and emotional possession, but it never came together for me.

The horror here—an orchid that wants to devour what it cannot control—should have been devastating. And conceptually, it is. The orchid’s hunger for Neve and later Shell is a brilliant metaphor for the way femininity is so often shaped by being wanted, used, or held in place. But that thematic core gets tangled in too many underdeveloped plotlines. Shell’s former life, the younger coworker, and Jen’s late-stage POV all felt like detours rather than layers. And the writing never quite earned the slower pacing it leaned on. I didn’t like the characters, and worse, I didn’t understand them. The emotional stakes felt smudged rather than sharpened.

That said, I was compelled to finish the book. There’s something raw and unnerving about the way the novel speaks to loneliness and grief—the way monstrous love can sometimes feel safer than no love at all. The orchid is the most vivid character, full of cruelty and ache. It becomes a metaphor for all the ways we justify the things that consume us. I just wish the story had trusted its terror more, and trimmed the excess to let it thrive.