The Marigold
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4.2 • 5 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
“This impressively bleak vision of the near future is as grotesquely amusing as it is grim.” — Publishers Weekly STARRED REVIEW
“A gripping tour-de-force torn from tomorrow’s headlines.” — David Demchuk, author of Red X and The Bone Mother
“A bold dystopian novel that captivates with its dread and depth. The Marigold is unhinged literary horror that goes right to the source of decay.” — Iain Reid, award-winning author of I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Foe, and We Spread
In a near-future Toronto buffeted by environmental chaos and unfettered development, an unsettling new lifeform begins to grow beneath the surface, feeding off the past.
The Marigold, a gleaming Toronto condo tower, sits a half-empty promise: a stack of scuffed rental suites and undelivered amenities that crumbles around its residents as a mysterious sludge spreads slowly through it. Public health inspector Cathy Jin investigates this toxic mold as it infests the city’s infrastructure, rotting it from within, while Sam “Soda” Dalipagic stumbles on a dangerous cache of data while cruising the streets in his Camry, waiting for his next rideshare alert. On the outskirts of downtown, 13-year-old Henrietta Brakes chases a friend deep underground after he’s snatched into a sinkhole by a creature from below.
All the while, construction of the city’s newest luxury tower, Marigold II, has stalled. Stanley Marigold, the struggling son of the legendary developer behind this project, decides he must tap into a hidden reserve of old power to make his dream a reality — one with a human cost.
Weaving together disparate storylines and tapping into the realms of body horror, urban dystopia, and ecofiction, The Marigold explores the precarity of community and the fragile designs that bind us together.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Throughout this crisply written urban horror novel, Sullivan (Waste) makes a chilling case for humanity's obsolescence. Ostensibly, the Marigold is a luxury tower in downtown Toronto. Actually, it's a dilapidated wreck, emblematic of the city's decay in the face of climate change, increasingly frequent sinkholes, and a moldlike eruption dubbed the Wet. Public health worker Cathy Jin and her partner, Jasmine, do their best to eradicate the Wet even as it evolves beyond their control, engulfing both buildings and people. At the same time, 13-year-old Henrietta Brakes climbs into one of the mammoth sinkholes in a futile attempt to rescue a friend who's been dragged down. Meanwhile, Toronto's movers and shakers discuss new civic developments, led by Stanley Marigold. Stanley's father built the eponymous structure and now Stanley is eager to validate himself by erecting a second Marigold tower—and he's willing to pay for each new construction with human sacrifice. Through linked vignettes, Sullivan peels back the layers of Toronto residents' desperation to reveal a disturbing truth: though condo pitchmen promise customers a secure, worry-free existence, only through succumbing to the Wet can the characters find peace. This impressively bleak vision of the near future is as grotesquely amusing as it is grim.
Customer Reviews
Unpleasant, Long and worst of all, Bland
I was intrigued by the premise of the Marigold and for the first 200 pages or so I was super engaged but then it devolved into an overly written slog that was challenging to finish. It didn’t help that the entirety of the prose was coated in a gross stickiness and that none of the characters were all that likeable or interesting. I think it would have been better if the author kept the Marigold to a tighter 300 pages (horror films rarely go long after all) and tossed all the unnecessary meanderings. The second star is for the clear passion the author has but he should focus more on what the reader needs to know rather than what he wants to tell them.