PositiveCriminal ElementLike all of Tremblay’s horror work, the most successful pieces in Growing Things are the stories where he scoops up genre conventions, holds them tenderly, and refashions them into something immediately recognizable and yet completely fresh ... Readers expecting traditional scares will need to recalibrate their expectations ... that’s really Tremblay’s greatest gift. He’ll tell you exactly what happened in a story. He’ll show you the monster crawling out of a swamp, he’ll show you photographs of the literal demons haunting an author, he’ll show you a man accepting the gift of a perfectly formed miniature bird’s head, and he’ll tell you a story about a pawn shop robbery gone horribly wrong, but for all the precision and detail, you still won’t be entirely sure what happened. Sometimes empty spaces are a gift we should cherish.
