Book 16 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! Only slightly behind. My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

Having recently gone through my friend Jendia Gammon’s book Atacama, one of her recent forays into horror, I decided to follow up that read with Doomflower (2025), another science fiction/horror tale!

Doomflower is a fun, fast-paced novel of a teenager trying to live her life as an apocalypse looms ever closer! It is a mixture of horror, science fiction, and teen drama that is never dull and carries you through from beginning to end.

Camellia Dume is the most popular and powerful girl at her high school in Malibu, bolstered by her daddy’s wealth and the freedom to do and say whatever she wants. She is cruel to her classmates and even her supposed friends and is also perfectly comfortable squaring off against the teachers.

Her dominance feels a little shaken when a new student Wray arrives on campus one day and shows defiance to Camellia’s attacks. But that is a small blip in Camellia’s routine: more pressing are snippets of news coming from the East Coast, where reports indicate that something very wrong has happened to the plant life and that it is having deadly consequences. As the stories become more prevalent and the incidents start being reported further West, it becomes harder to ignore the reality that the end of the world may be coming. Camellia tries to hold it together, even when her father goes missing. But this mean girl may hold the only hope of saving humanity, if she doesn’t run out of time to figure it out…

Doomflower is a fun story in large part due to its protagonist Camellia who begins the novel very unsympathetic and a borderline antihero. As the novel progresses, we learn more about Camellia’s history that led her to be the way she is and defines a lot of her choices. In the meantime, we are treated to mean girl high school drama that is entertaining to follow! Doomflower is as much a character study as it is a horror novel, and it is stronger for it.

My favorite part of the book, however, is the creeping dread that Gammon inserts into the narrative, even when life is still rather mundane in Malibu! At first, Camellia is hardly aware that anything is going on other than seeing her classmates watching videos of things happening in the East and whispered rumors of horrors beyond imagining. As the threat grows, so does the infiltration of the news into the story, where we gradually get more details and authority figures get increasingly nervous. This growing sense of doom is really well done and I suspect was directly inspired by life right at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, when at first we heard stories of bad things happening halfway around the world, then heard of cases arriving in the US, and then went into frantic panic buying to shelter in place when it reached our neighborhoods and were inundated with news stories of the horrors.

Gammon keeps the killer plants at a distance for most of the novel, which seems like an astute choice for building the fear and uncertainty. Camellia is so self-absorbed at first that she can’t be bothered to learn more of what’s going on, so the little bits of information we get are all second hand until late in the book. Uncertainty and the unknown are important factors for making a horror story work, and Gammon makes it work well for her here.

It is worth noting that Doomflower is also a story of romance, and this aspect of the book is also deftly handled! As I have said, the book is as much a teen drama as it is a horror novel, and it manages to work well for both genres.

The end of the book gives us a partial resolution but also remains somewhat open-ended, with the possibility of more tales to tell — I’ll be curious to see if Gammon follows up with more stories set in the Doomflower world!

Overall, Doomflower is another solid and entertaining novel by Jendia Gammon. I’ll be catching up on more of her writing in the near future!