Customer Reviews

The plants: A novel

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Kenneth McKenney, The Plants (Putnam, 1976)

There are great books. There are good books. There are mediocre books. There are bad books. And, at the other end of the spectrum from the great books, there is that small, small subsection of bad books that are so ludicrous, so stupid, so unintentionally hysterical that they achieve a kind of anti-greatness; you cannot stop reading, for if you do, you will never know just how horrible the book might possibly get. The Plants is one of those books.

The annoying, tiresome, and awesomely stupid ecohorror movement of the late eighties and early nineties wasn't even a gleam in its daddy's eye when geologist Kenneth McKenney penned The Plants in the mid-seventies. Hell, most people didn't even know what granola was yet. Little did anyone realize that The Plants would end up being a prophetic novel-- not that, as its incredibly inane plot puts forth, plants would develop intelligence (and the ability to foretell the future) and rise up to destroy humanity if we do not bend to their will-- but that it, and Prophecy, which appeared a few years later-- would unleash a string of equally silly novels about how the environment would spawn monsters to eat all the bad folks who did things like throw cigarette butts out car windows. (I'm still waiting for the definitive global warming ecohorror novel, in which a massive invisible beast made of nothing but heat goes around baking people into souffles at night.)

Sure, there had been ecological novels before, including a few that toyed with the horror genre (Russell Braddon's wonderful satire The Year of the Angry Rabbit is the best of them), but they didn't take themselves seriously as horror novels. The Plants and Prophecy changed all that. Once you've got one toxic-waste mutant, one group of intelligent plants that kills humans taken seriously, why not a flood of them? Thankfully, it burned itself out in the mid-nineties, but my, what horrors it did spawn.

Brandling is a remote rural village, population somewhere under fifty, in England. It has been gifted with wonderful weather for an entire summer in the mid-seventies, and things are growing in Brandling like the country has never seen. Even those with black thumbs, like town drunk Charlie Crump, are growing prize-winning plants-- Charlie Crump's marrow squash even catches the eye of the BBC. They send science reporter Philip Monk, whose family lives in Brandling, to investigate. But some of those in Brandling, including Monk's own daughter, Deborah, seem to have a closer connection to the plants than most humans-- and the plants themselves are definitely trying to get a closer connection to humanity.

While the earlier ecological novels were usually willing to poke fun at themselves, The Plants takes itself deadly seriously, and in doing so invites us to poke fun at it. And there's a great deal of fun to poke-- overwrought writing, stereotypical characters for whom "cardboard" is too three-dimensional a description, wooden pacing, painfully predictable plot twists. It's a wonder this novel got published at all, much less found its way into international rights. This is the horror-novel equivalent of a Dame Barbara Cartland novel. If you can find a copy for twenty-five cents at a local yard sale, pick it up; you might not find a funnier book on your shelf for years to come. **

The plants are coming! The plants are coming! That's the premise of McKenney's novel of horror and suspense, The Plants. Sounds silly? Maybe so but this book promises chills and it delivers.

It's been a long, hot summer in England. With no end to the heat and showers every day the country is beginning to resemble a tropical paradise. Vegetation everywhere is experiencing vigorous growth but in the small village of Brandling things are coming to a head. Here in this small town the plants are trying to communicate.

What are they trying to tell us? What is their message? And why are people turning up dead? It's up to Philip Monk to figure it all out but he's got some good help along the way. He'll get clues from scientists and reporters, police officers and a deft old religious coot in the village of Brandling. But will it be enough? Can Philip and the rest of the villagers figure out what the plants want before it's too late?

The Plants is a spine tingling tail of terror. The suspense builds bit by bit, page by page, until the final moments when Kenneth McKenney brings it all to a very satisfying close. But be cautioned. While reading this book you might be well advised to move your house plants to another room.

The thing with this book is that during the course of reading it there aren't many victims since its mostly all build-up for the end which is fine if it does indeed deliver. I was enjoying it "knowing" all hell would eventually break loose. *spoiler alert* Unfortunately what it all leads up to is a lesson about togetherness and being one with nature and respecting it. The little carnage is halted after everyone learns this and a *chuckles* conversation with the plants leads to a sacrifice. No, I'm sorry to tell you this is not the killer plant book one expects. Minimal plant activity, very few kills/attacks, and a build-up to not much of anything.