"The Blooming is both a suspenseful thriller for our troubled times and an emotionally gripping mother/daughter showdown for the ages. Every mom’s nightmare comes to frightening life in these pages…it’s motherhood run amuck, dark impulses mixing with fierce love. A page-turning, heart-wrenching nightmare." --Elizabeth Searle, screenwriter (I’ll Show You Mine) and author (Lock Her Up)

"A brilliant, twisted nail-biter of a novel about motherhood, guilt, grief, and how far we will go to save someone we love. Ferencik's characters take root and grow in the most disturbingly surreal set of circumstances I've had the pleasure of encountering in fiction. After reading THE BLOOMING, you'll never look at mushrooms the same way. Smart, sharp, emotionally fraught ecohorror that clings to your imagination, and doesn't let go. A darkly entertaining read." --Paulette Kennedy, bestselling author of The Devil and Mrs. Davenport

"What if that which you most loved and that which you most feared coexisted in the same bespectacled 7-year-old girl? What if that girl was your daughter? Erica Ferencik brilliantly realizes this nightmarish scenario in a pulse-revving eco-horror that falls somewhere between The Bad Seed and The Last of Us. Pure, desperate love between mother and child is the only defense against a blooming invasion that’s both insidious and monstrously beautiful. At a time when readers are enthralled with tales of Kingdom Fungi, this story offers fresh terrors animated by sharp, evocative writing." —Rebecca Baum, author of The Brood

"The Blooming drops Dani, a single mom and PhD student, and her daughter Piper into an ecological and psychological nightmare. The result is taut, creepy, fungal fun. Well, my kind fungal horror fun, anyway." --Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep

“I read Erica's Ferencik's relentlessly tense and eerie novel The Blooming with my heart in my mouth, choked by the insidious horrors germinating deeper and darker with every page...[this] is a stifling blend of maternal paranoia, childhood crisis, and cataclysmic scientific discovery as a mycologist mother suspects a disturbing new form of mushroom has established itself in her daughter, altering her behaviour and channelling a nightmare from their past. A spore-core tour de force.” —Leigh Radford, author of One Yellow Eye

"A terrifying page-turner about a single mom and mycologist battling an insidious enemy for her child’s soul. Chilling, heart-pounding, and utterly gruesome. This eco-horror is my favourite Ferencik novel yet!” --Robyn Harding, internationally bestselling author of Strangers in the Villa

“Fresh horrors threaten to emerge from every page of this engrossing, viscerally terrifying novel, as if cued by the fungal entity at its core–an entity that poses life-and-death tests of maternal love and the destruction of the world as we’ve come to know it. Teeming with tendriling, squelching thrills, this novel is a masterwork of ecohorror.” –Beth Castrodale, author of The Inhabitants

"Horror gets under your skin best when it wears the face of someone you love. Erica Ferencik understands this in her bones. The Blooming is a portrait of a mother watching her daughter disappear into something she cannot name and cannot stop, and it is absolutely merciless. The fungal horror is visceral and invasive, but the most gripping element of this novel is the relationship at its center. Mother-daughter bonds rarely get this kind of treatment in the genre, and Ferencik makes you feel every agonizing inch of that love. I read this one with my hands over my mouth." --Crystal King, author of The Happiness Collector and In The Garden of Monsters 

"A chilling, enviably brilliant reimagining of The Exorcist as fungal horror about a sentient cordyceptic entity that possesses the seven-year-old daughter of a single mom. Ferencik proved her chops with three first-rate survival thrillers...in The Blooming, she cranks up the suspense to sweat-sodden-bedsheet levels with a terrifying parental nightmare of pure ecohorror. This is a nail-biting, squirm-inducing, emotionally gripping, ecologically topical tale of terror about a mother, her daughter, and the "demon" we summon with every involuntary breath we draw. The Blooming is not to be missed!" – Sean Carlin, author of The Dogcatcher

“Historical family traumas lie just beneath the surface, connecting the past and present like roots that infect new generations with their awful, violent blooms in Erica Ferencik’s chilling new novel...The subterranean forces guiding and controlling Ferencik’s characters prove overwhelming, breaking hearts and minds and urging them toward violence and domination. After reading this novel, one may wish to stay out of the basement following a heavy rain; you don’t know what poison can spring forth when secrets are kept in the dank and dark long enough.” —Marc E. Fitch, author of Boy in the Box and Dead Ends