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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.
"This impressively bleak vision of the near future is as grotesquely amusing as it is grim." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Sullivan's story blends body horror, urban dystopia, and eco-horror into a unique tale about the high price of progress." ―Library Journal
"The ecohorror angle provides something different for horror fans and climate activists alike." ―Booklist
"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
"Sullivan cultivates a truly suffocating atmosphere of economic and social tension, a sense that the world has moved beyond the verge of collapse and into a long, slow slide to oblivion. This is urban horror done right, layered with the cold, unalloyed terror of watching the world crumble in real time. The Marigold is a back-breaker for the genre." ―Gretchen Felker-Martin, author of Manhunt
"Andrew F. Sullivan's books delve into dark territories other writers are too timid to explore, finding nuance and emotional resonance in that stony soil. The Marigold has all the hallmarks of his past work while being something all its own, daunting and daring and just a little scary." ―Craig Davidson, bestselling author of The Saturday Night Ghost Club and Precious Cargo
"Andrew F. Sullivan's The Marigold is a Cronenbergian Bonfire of the Vanities, a scalpel-sharp near-future thriller about an all-consuming city in thrall to greed and power, and the disparate creatures, human and otherwise, caught in its draintrap. A gripping tour-de-force torn from tomorrow's headlines." ―David Demchuk, author of Red X and The Bone Mother
This information about The Marigold was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Andrew F. Sullivan is the author of novels The Marigold; The Handyman Method (co-written with Nick Cutter); Waste, a Globe and Mail Best Book; and the story collection All We Want Is Everything, a Globe and Mail Best Book and finalist for the Relit Award. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario.
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