Book Review: Doomflower by Jendia Gammon

A love letter to ’80s teen high school drama science fiction and to ’50s and ’80s disaster movies, with a modern sensibility and feel

Camellia Dume has it all. Queen Bee of Killian Highschool in Malibu, in terms of popularity, meanness, and wealth. She lives with her father in a house with a refrigerator that could pass the Turing Test. But her last normal day on earth, of putting down inferiors and reinforcing her hierarchy, is shook by two things. First is the arrival of a new student, Wray, who is a country mouse who draws Camellia’s ire... and something else. Typical teenage angst and drama.

Oh, and apparently, across the country, although Camellia doesn’t notice at first, the Plant Kingdom is starting to run amok.And Camellia, improbably enough, may be a key to resisting the invasion. Or at least some people think she is.

All this is the story of Doomflower, by Jendia Gammon.

The ’80s were a fertile time for the movies that Doomflower seems to be in conversation with, and be a love letter dedicated to. There are several strains here, and I want to discuss how the book is in conversation with those movies and what Gammon aims to achieve in the novel, and how successful she is.

Let’s start with the teen drama. The novel revolves around Camellia’s Alpha Female status as the richest and most popular girl at school, even though she is only a sophomore. She feels a little older than that, though, in the text, more like a junior in terms of power, authority and outlook. Camellia is the kind of student that has some nebulous but real power over teachers as well as students, or at least is willing to try and throw her weight around if she can. So the story draws from movies like Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and very much even more so, Pretty in Pink or Heathers. The book thrives on teen drama, cliques, rivalries and factions within the student body.

The author has taken the high schools of these movies and updated them to a modern sensibility and feel, and turned up the romance and passions even more into the realness of melodrama. So: modern teen attitudes on phone calls vs. texts, queer-friendly and -open environments. The book may have the plotting and setting of an ’80s disaster and science fiction movie (more on that anon), but it does not feel dated or a period piece, which is what I was half expecting going into the story. It feels like, for all the melodrama, it could (even with the technology and speculation) could take place today.

And then there are the science fiction elements. The book title, Doomflower, is a nice literary allusion to not only the botany-based threat, but also to the fact of Camellia’s name. She is the titular doomflower in terms of her ruling the garden of the high school, with her poisonous bon mots and cutting remarks for all and sundry. (She definitely goes with wanting to be loved and feared at the same time). But then, of course, there is the actual botany-based science fictional terror.

Gammon is really clever about how this threat erupts. It happens at first in the background, far away, and our protagonist (we stick with Camellia as our POV throughout the novel) is blissfully unaware. It’s a really good use of information control, as she doesn’t have an inkling, being self-absorbed as she usually is, that something is afoot. It isn’t until the threat becomes local, and impossible to ignore, that she realizes that the fate of the world is really at stake. And then, of course, with all the drama and passion of a teenager, she is plunged into the sometimes absurd nature of the malicious plants. But not just absurdity, but often outright horror, darkness, and even a paean to cooperation and teamwork. In true teenage comedy/drama/science fiction story, in the end, the teenagers are the ones with the most agency.

There are a number of ’80s movies that the book is drawing on, but the one that comes right to my mind as the one that is an ur-text to inspire this book is the science fiction/horror/comedy Night of the Comet. You know that one: a comet appears for the first time in 65 million years, and most people are either turned to dust or turned into zombie creatures. A few teenagers survive. Oh, and some evil scientists who have their own plans for the post-apocalyptic society. And randomly, “Chakotay” (Robert Beltran) does as well. Anyway, the vibe of that movie, which swings between comedy, horror and drama in equal measure, really feels how this book tries to run. The movie even turns on the scientists wanting to use the protagonist to face the biological threat. As it turns out, Camellia is seen as a potential solution to the threat in this book as well.

I suppose, if you want to look at it a slightly different way, there is a bit of the ’50s science fiction/horror in that vibe in addition to ’80s Night of the Comet and Weird Science. Sure, the ’50s movies (Hello, Day of the Triffids. Hi there, This Island Earth. Greetings, The Blob) don’t generally have teenagers as major protagonists, but the sense of campy and over-the-top threat is something that channels from those movies into this novel via the aforementioned 80’s movies. Those movies, though, often have rather stock and flat characters without any real growth, only there to be menaced and attacked.

And yet, just like in other works I’ve read by Gammon, the novel’s characters are not as uncomplicated as I have made them out to this point. If you think that Camellia is simply an Alpha Female at this high school, who is feared and loved in equal measure, and who has to face this world-threatening botanical attack, there is plenty more to her. Camellia is endearingly complicated and multi-sided. She often doesn’t see her father, and in some ways has a better relationship with her AI refrigerator than with anyone else in the book. And then there is that enemies-to-something that she has with Wray. And yeah, that is meant to be damning of her. We are meant to see her at her worst, and to get better, in melodramatic fashion. That’s a tradition from before the ’80s movies that this book is a love letter to, and a tradition since.

And then there is her relationship with her mother. She is dead, and the effect of that death on Camellia is a throughline that starts at the beginning of the book and runs through to its finale. It doesn’t excuse how she acts to all that is around her, but it gives context and sympathy, and complicates the character. Gammon hits us with this early enough in the book that we understand where Camellia is coming from. Gammon also does this with Camellia’s grandmother (who is from Tennessee back east; it appears that Gammon loves to root her characters in the region of the country that she grew up in). No coincidence, it turns out that when the botanical invasion begins, it starts in that region of the country.

I’ve alluded to it above, but let me reiterate that the novel is pitch-perfect. Aside from the fact that it is set in the 2020s in terms of technology and the like, this novel could have been a novelization of a 1980s science fiction teenage movie in the mold of Night of the Comet or Weird Science in terms of capturing the voice of those kinds of movies, with the helpings of less speculative fiction teen dramas and comedies in the bargain. The novel is also very much a love letter to the Los Angeles basin, Malibu in particular, and gave me pleasant memories of my short stint in Southern California. All this, and Gammon’s writing style, snappy dialogue and word choice make the novel eminently readable. It’s campy, with heaps of horror, a light, quick, and fun read, a look at a character that at first glance one should absolutely hate, but one we come to get to know, sympathize with, and in the end, care for by the end of the novel.

Oh, and that is one fantastic eye-catching cover, in the bargain.

Highlights:

• ’80s teen comedy meets teen SF novel in a modern setting
• Campy fun, dialogue, action, and verve
• A mean girl we should hate, but come to love

Reference: Gammon, Jendia. Doomflower [Encyclopocalypse Publications, 2025].

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Book Review: Atacama by Jendia Gammon

A pulse-pounding SF/Thriller hybrid that feels like a modern day episode of The X-Files.

Fiona Hawthrone has a problem. Her best friend Alva, a researcher in the titular Atacama desert in South America is dead, along with the entirety of her team... and all the signs point to something like murder. There’s not a lot that Fiona can do about it from all the way in eastern Tennessee, but soon she is wrapped up in the mystery of her death, a strange and powerful corporation, and something else, even more unexpected. Something impossible. Something extraordinary.

This is the story of Jendia Gammon’s Atacama.

In the tagline above, I mentioned The X-Files, and I do think that using that as the model is the best way to describe and follow the throughline of the book. After a strange in medias res prologue (that appears to be actually an excerpt from a different story altogether set in the same verse), we are plunged into the at-first quotidian life of Dr. Fiona Hawthorne. We get a “bang” of an opener right away as she gets the news the entire expedition to the Atacama that included her friend Alva is dead, no sign of the bodies, nothing. Fiona is then inexorably, piece by piece caught up in a whirlwind of intrigue as, given that she is Alva’s best friend, a number of parties come to call on her, not all of them with her best interest in mind. And of course she wants to know what happened to Alva, and what it all means. 

Thus, for a good portion of the book, there is only the barest hint of a SFF tone to the book, the book preferring to the technothriller slash mystery and also a deep dive into Fiona’s character and life. We get a strong sense of her as a character, as someone who has had Alva’s death push her off what was already a precarious cliff. A lot of the novel is her working through her friend’s death and what it means for her, and for those around her. Gammon does the emotional and psychological beats of this rather well, bringing us firmly into Fiona’s mindset and her precarious state. (the entire book is from her point of view).

And as you might expect, eventually, all roads lead to the Atacama desert, and Fiona finding out what is really going on and what happened to Alva and the remainder of her team. The time in eastern Tennessee is the prelude, background and foundation for Fiona’s fateful trip to South America. And the point is made that Eastern Tennessee is a very different place, in terms of physical geography and environment, than the driest of deserts, the Atacama. It’s quite the cultural and physical shock for Fiona when she goes there, and a writing shock as well.¹

There are some mysterious goings on in Tennesse. However when it does come time to really ramp up the genre elements (and I should be clear, that also includes notes of horror that we saw before in Tennessee, but really get a real dose of here), mysterious doings at the college, the strange corporation known as Cuprum, and the slow unveiling of what is really going on, the trip to the Atacama and what is there and why really bring this facet of the novel to life. Since the unraveling of that secret and what it is and what it means is really a treasure to be savored, I do have to draw a curtain around the central mystery of the book. I do point at my earlier statement that this really is an X-Files episode in tone. Mysterious doings, a character under pressure, and a mysterious entity, and the mysterious Cuprum.

Although there are a set of interesting characters around Fiona (including Alva, whom we get to know of, after death), Cuprum is the star of the book that I really want to discuss besides Fiona herself. While she has that interesting set of co-stars and characters to bounce off of, where the book really sings, aside from its central mystery and genre element, is Cuprum. If you like weird faceless corporations with that sinister and higher-tech-than-anyone-should-have sort of vibe, Cuprum is here for you. This is an advancement, a evolution from the days of the X-Files where it would have been a quasi or fully government agency that was behind what is going on. Here, Gammon goes with the times to a very creepy international corporation with an unknown agenda and even more unknown and unearthly technology at its disposal. 

There is a piece of tech, though, that Cuprum employs in the book that I didn’t quite accept as being realistic. It’s necessary for the plot, especially for the denouement, but given the ending, I think it is not strictly necessary, and given that it did somewhat break my suspension of disbelief a bit, I think it could have been done without or handled somewhat differently. Otherwise, the resolution of the story and the mystery and the “sting in the tail” at the end of the novel are all very classic X-files like techniques which are really employed here well.

That’s the thing about this novel. It’s definitely more mystery, strange occurrences, X-Files-esque feel and tone, with a strong side dish of personal growth, a strong sense of place (both in Eastern Tennessee and in the Atacama) than it really is a straight up science fiction novel.It sits near the borders of science fiction, technothriller and even mystery. It feels also, for all of its genre elements, to be a very personal, introspective and a story of the author’s heart. There is a real care and touch to Fiona’s life and story here that feels weirdly intimate, and it helped draw me into her story, and the story of the novel in general. 

I want to say a few words about the writing, because it really needs a little more highlighting beyond what I’ve said before. Be it the interiority of Fiona’s head and mind as she is going through a lot of trauma (a real highlight of the book to treat such a subject with such care in the writing) or the descriptions of the locales, or the twisting plot and intrigue, the writing flows smoothly and well. The novel is a complicated piece of moving parts, but the author is always on top of what is happening, and plays fair with the reader at the same time. On a sentence by sentence level, there is a strong execution of the craft here, and the overall structure of the plotting is very sound. I keep going back to the X-Files as my touchstone here, but this really is like a good X-Files episode: crisp, well paced, and page-turning.

Finally it should be noted that the novel is also illustrated gorgeously, from the cover, through each chapter, to the end, a real compliment to the writing. Overall, this makes the experience of reading the book lush, inventive and immersive. It may be less strongly genre than maybe I would have liked, but it was an excellent and entertaining read. 

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Highlights:

• Immersive writing with a strong character focus
• Excellent X-Files like feel 
• Strong sense of place both in Tennessee and in the deadly desert

Reference: Gammon, Jendia, Atacama, [Sley House Publishing, 2025]

¹ Given the recent terrible flooding and damage done to this region by Hurricane Helene, the parts of the novel set in Eastern Tennessee hit even harder than they normally would. Also, I was also reminded of the TV series The Peripheral, which has its setting in the same area (in point of fact, the town where much of that footage was filmed was particularly hard hit by the hurricane).

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.