Sarah Maria Griffin’s latest novel, “Eat the Ones You Love,” is a lush, unsettling tale that flourishes in the intersection between botanical horror and queer romance. The story unfolds in the dying Woodbine Crown Mall in Dublin, where Shell Pine—recently single, unemployed, and living with her parents—stumbles upon a “HELP NEEDED” sign in a florist’s window. What begins as a desperate grab for employment blossoms into a dark, entangling narrative about desire, consumption, and the monstrous things that grow when no one is looking.
Griffin, known for her previous novels “Spare and Found Parts” and “Other Words for Smoke,” continues her exploration of the uncanny with a story that feels both familiar and entirely alien. Her prose is dense with imagery, creating a sensory experience that leaves readers feeling as though they’ve brushed against something dangerous yet irresistible.
The Characters: Fertile Ground for Obsession
At the heart of this novel is a twisted triangle between:
- Shell: A graphic designer-turned-florist whose loneliness and desire for connection make her vulnerable to influence
- Neve: The mysterious shop owner with scars on her hands and secrets in her heart
- Baby: The sentient plant/entity who narrates portions of the novel, hungry for Neve’s heart and willing to use Shell to get it
Griffin excels at portraying Shell’s inner landscape, particularly her instinct to retreat from conflict and her tendency to become absorbed in others rather than developing her own identity. Shell’s attraction to Neve feels authentic, rooted in loneliness and genuine admiration rather than mere physical desire. Her character development follows the arc of a vine seeking light—stretching beyond her boundaries but ultimately susceptible to more powerful forces.
Neve is masterfully crafted as both victim and collaborator. Her relationship with Baby spans decades, built on blood, secrecy, and a form of twisted devotion. Griffin leaves Neve’s motivations deliberately ambiguous—is she trapped or complicit? Does she resist Baby or quietly crave what he offers? This ambiguity creates a fascinating character study in the nature of long-term abuse and codependency.
However, the standout performance comes from Baby himself, whose first-person narration provides some of the novel’s most chilling and beautiful passages. His voice combines childlike observation with ancient hunger, creating a haunting perspective that’s both alien and disturbingly relatable. When Baby declares, “I would wormed through the eyeballs of anyone who had seen her anyhow,” regarding Neve, the reader experiences both revulsion and a twisted understanding of his possessive love.
Setting: The Decaying Heart of Community
The Woodbine Crown Mall serves as more than backdrop—it becomes a character in its own right. Griffin’s description of the mall as “a heaving, dilapidated heart at the middle of a wire grid of old veins” establishes it as both physical setting and metaphorical landscape. The Crown represents a fading way of life, a communal space being consumed from within, much as Baby consumes those who enter his domain.
The Green Hall—the overgrown terrarium at the mall’s center where Baby resides—provides a striking contrast to the sterile retail environment. It’s described with sensual, almost erotic language, a secret garden of excess and danger amid commercial decline. Griffin’s attention to sensory detail here is exquisite—the reader can almost smell the mixture of rot and pollen, feel the unnatural heat emanating from within.
Themes: What Feeds and What Consumes
“Eat the Ones You Love” explores several intertwining themes:
- Consumption and desire: Everyone in this story is hungry for something—Baby for Neve’s heart, Shell for connection, Neve for freedom. Griffin examines how desire can both nourish and destroy.
- Possession versus love: The central question becomes whether Baby’s all-consuming obsession with Neve constitutes love or something more parasitic. The same question extends to human relationships throughout the novel.
- Community in decline: The Woodbine Crown Mall’s impending demolition serves as both literal plot point and metaphor for changing social structures. The mall workers form a makeshift family, clinging to one another as their shared space collapses.
- Bodily autonomy: Griffin deftly explores consent through both human relationships and Baby’s invasive presence. When Baby’s vines penetrate Shell’s skin, creating flowers that emerge from her palm, the violation feels deeply intimate and disturbing.
Prose: Beautiful Rot
Griffin’s writing style is richly textured, with sentences that unfurl like the vines she describes. Consider this passage:
“The cadence of Daniel’s chat was well rehearsed, a person who had to keep talking all day at close proximity to people’s heads—so much so that he segued into the heavy in a way that Shell barely even noticed.”
This demonstrates Griffin’s talent for embedding character development within seemingly casual observations. The prose oscillates between lush description and sharp dialogue, creating a rhythm that pulls readers deeper into the narrative’s grasp.
The novel’s strongest moments come from Baby’s first-person sections, where Griffin crafts a voice that’s simultaneously inhuman and deeply emotional:
“I am the curtain and the one behind it,” Baby declares, a line that encapsulates the novel’s exploration of hidden threats and desires.
Structural Growth: From Seed to Fruit
“Eat the Ones You Love” is organized into botanical sections—Seed, Shoot, Blossom, and Fruit—charting both the story’s progression and Baby’s increasing influence. This structure works effectively, though some readers might find the middle section (“Shoot”) slightly overlong, with Shell’s day-to-day work at the florist occasionally slowing the narrative momentum.
The pacing accelerates dramatically in “Blossom” and “Fruit,” where Griffin expertly balances multiple perspectives and timelines. The collapse of the mall provides both literal and metaphorical climax, with physical destruction mirroring emotional devastation.
Criticisms: A Few Thorns
Despite its strengths, “Eat the Ones You Love” isn’t without flaws:
- The secondary characters outside the mall (Shell’s old friends, ex-fiancé) sometimes feel thinly sketched compared to the richly developed mall workers.
- Certain plot elements—particularly Jen’s miraculous survival—strain credibility, even within the novel’s supernatural framework.
- The resolution, while haunting, leaves some narrative threads dangling, including questions about Baby’s ultimate nature and origins.
- The psychological impact of witnessing horrific events feels somewhat underexplored in Shell’s case, her trauma processed too neatly in the epilogue.
For Fans Of…
“Eat the Ones You Love” will appeal to readers who enjoyed:
- The body horror of T. Kingfisher’s “The Hollow Places”
- The queer gothic elements of Carmen Maria Machado’s “Her Body and Other Parties“
- The sentient-plant horror of “Little Shop of Horrors”
- The retail-hell-meets-supernatural of Grady Hendrix’s “Horrorstör”
Griffin’s voice remains distinctive, however, combining Irish literary tradition with contemporary horror in a way that feels fresh and unsettling.
Final Words:
“Eat the Ones You Love” is a captivating, disturbing novel that will linger in readers’ minds long after the final page. Griffin has crafted a story that’s simultaneously a meditation on desire, a critique of capitalism, and a genuinely frightening horror tale. Though it occasionally stumbles under the weight of its ambitions, the novel’s strengths—particularly its voice, atmosphere, and central metaphor—far outweigh its weaknesses.
Like Baby himself, this book will wrap its tendrils around you, drawing you deeper into its dark, flowering heart. Just be prepared: once consumed, you may find it difficult to break free.
The Verdict: A Haunting Bloom Worth Cultivating
Sarah Maria Griffin has delivered a novel that defies easy categorization, blending horror, romance, and literary fiction into something uniquely unsettling. “Eat the Ones You Love” examines our deepest hungers—for connection, for meaning, for love—and asks whether fulfilling those hungers might ultimately consume us.
For readers willing to be drawn into its strange garden of horrors, this novel offers a rewarding, if occasionally disturbing, experience. Griffin continues to establish herself as a distinctive voice in contemporary horror, crafting stories that are as thoughtful as they are frightening. This is a writer whose career, like Baby himself, continues to grow in fascinating and unexpected directions.
