I really don’t know how I feel about this book, it was certainly one hell of a trip! It was grossly visceral and chock full of shock, it definitely earned every single one of the trigger warnings at the beginning. We take a journey through the deep dark and foreboding Pamoga state forest, this is constantly changing and is disturbingly desolate, the only landmarks are the dead bodies. Sarah and guide Andy are in search of a special mushroom, but although they are semi successful, they find more than they expected when they stumble across an orgiastic lesbian cult who worship the Green Lady. This is definitely not for most, I’m not even sure if it was for me, but I found it strangely compelling.

This book is for the horror fan that loves weird horror, drugs/substance based surreality, and perhaps fungus/nature based freakery. Moonflow is unapologetically vulgar and brash in its language and imagery, and very good at putting you on edge. It is a good piece of queer horror for fans of cuckoo or manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin, or if you are a collector of fungus/plant based horror of all kinds. It has touches of a folk horror vibe with the king of the forest elements and even a little vandermeer flavour.

This book was wild! I was so weirded out at times but I couldn’t put it down. I read an eARC of this book on NetGalley so thank you to the author and the publisher. This book follows a trans woman who cultivates mushrooms. She’s asked to go to a specific forest to find a rare and powerful mushroom. She follows a ranger into the forest to find it, but things start to get very freaky. The ranger navigates by dead bodies in the forest and she is warned of danger in the forest. Alongside we also meet members of lesbian cult in the forest involving mushrooms and raccoons. It feels odd to describe, but it’s genuinely amazing. I loved how mindblowing this felt. I couldn’t predict where this book was going to go. Reading it was like going down a slide increasingly quickly in the dark and not knowing where the end was. It was utterly thrilling. It’s been a while since I read something that felt like this. This book is atmospheric, unusual and exciting. I loved the setting, the mushroom focus and the freaky intense cult!

‘Moonflow’ has a dreamlike quality – magical beautiful and eerie. It is poetic in style and quick to read. The characters reflect deep human emotions of grief, identity, love, and loss giving a real sense of connection. This is the kind of story that stays with you long after the last page is turned. I would like to thank the publisher for supplying me with a copy of ‘Moonflow’ in exchange for an honest review.

I was interested in this book for its completely insane-sounding premise, and I was absolutely not disappointed. The plot, at its core, follows down-on-her-luck Sarah’s attempts to track down a prized mushroom known as the King’s Breakfast, because she needs to pay her rent. This mushroom apparently produces the craziest trips, and it can only be found in the Pamogo Forest, a huge swathe of trees that may or may not be supernatural. Sarah is paired with Andy, a supposedly expert guide who, similarly to on Everest, uses the bodies of dead hikers as markers on his established trail into the Pamogo. Of course, everything goes downhill pretty damn quickly, and Sarah and Andy find themselves entangled with what can only be described as a horny, matriarchal cult that worships an entity known as the Green Lady and who have embedded themselves deep in the forest in denial of all things patriarchal. There’s actually a lot more going on beneath the superficial craziness of the narrative. The use of mushrooms and the resulting trips means that we can never fully trust what we’re told; even MC Sarah doubts the things she experiences, and calls her own memory into question. There’s also a suitably coarse and sometimes quite gross explorations of gender, specifically femininity as it’s expressed by the Green lady cult. For example, Sarah is a transwoman and by the cult’s standards is not “one of them”. Sarah herself struggles with her own gender identity and expression, as she is highly dissatisfied with her body. A more minor but equally important POV character, the weirdly named Hell Slut, also struggles with her own femininity, as she’s a huge, hulking force of nature and doesn’t consider herself “womanly”. The mushrooms, of course, factor into the plot in a big way. Without spoiling it, all I’ll say is that it’s the most absurd but most satisfying use of mushrooms in a book I think I’ve ever read. The final act makes you question whether what is happening is actually even happening, or whether we’re on a bad trip alongside Sarah. The only reason this gets 4 stars from me, rather than the full 5, is the sometimes over-the-top focus on genitals. I knew what I was signing up for with a book like this, but it did become a bit much at times, to the point where the mention/presence of genitals lost its shock value. A special mention for this goes to the repeated descriptions of the sheer ridiculous size of the eponymous Mother Moonflow’s breasts (Moonflow being the cult leader). Word of warning: take the content warning at the start of this book seriously. There are some moments that really do toe the line into the taboo. Thank you to the publisher for my proof copy.