Trang Thanh Tran

Author of SHE IS A HAUNTING

They Bloom at Night

coming March 4th, 2025

They Bloom at Night

Monsterhood is a girl's body you don't belong in.

A red algae bloom has taken over Mercy, Louisiana, ever since a hurricane devastated the town. Mutated wildlife lurks in the water that rises by the day, but Mercy has always been a place where monsters walk in plain sight. Especially at its heart: the Cove, where Noon’s life was upended long before the storm at a party her older boyfriend insisted on. 

Now, Noon is stuck navigating the submerged town with her mom, who believes their dead family has reincarnated as sea creatures. Alone with the pain of what happened that night at the cove, Noon buries the truth: she is not the right shape.

When Mercy’s predatory leader demands Noon and her mom capture the creature drowning residents, she reluctantly finds an ally in his deadly hunter of a daughter and friends old and new. But the next storm approaches, and Noon must confront the past and decide if it’s time to answer the monster itching at her skin.

Read an excerpt on reactor.

Cover Artist: Elena Masci

Cover Designer: John Candell

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Praise for They Bloom at Night

With a razor sharp mastery of craft, a haunting original premise and topical themes that nearly everyone can identify with in some way shape or form, Tran has created a chillingly haunting novel that will appeal to fans of anyone yearning for more bite and meat to their horror. A literary tour-de-force that should go down in history as a masterclass in atmospheric and terrifying writing.

Kosoko Jackson
USA TODAY Bestselling author of The Forest Demands Its Due

Gorgeous, gruesome, and fiercely cathartic, They Bloom at Night is body horror with a beating heart.

Rebecca Mahoney
author of The Valley and the Flood and The Memory Eater

Simmering with rage, longing, and danger on every page, They Bloom at Night is an unforgettable story about surviving in a world that’s abandoned you. Trang Thanh Tran has created a horrifying, mesmerizing world that’s not too far from our own, challenging us to examine who the real monsters truly are. By the end of this tense journey, readers will find themselves transformed like Noon, shedding the old version of themselves and becoming something powerful, free, and new.

Alex Brown
Locus Award nominated author of Damned If You Do

A briny, rotting ode to the things we must become to survive and the things we yearn to become when the surviving is over. In elegant, atmospheric prose, Trang Thanh Tran peels back layers of salty skin and sea foam to expose the truth: even when we are wrong, even when we are monstrous, we are whole.

Courtney Gould
award-winning author of The Dead and The Dark

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