On Sundays She Picked Flowers (2020) – The Nature of Horror

I was excited right off the bat when On Sundays She Picked Flowers came down the pipeline; if there are two things I love, they’re debut novels and Southern gothic horror. The author, Yah Yah Scholfield may be new, but they certainly know their stuff, dropping nods and homages to classics throughout this work. Beware of minor spoilers.

Paying Homage to Great Fiction

Two points struck me as I was making my notes for this review: the first is a description of a house that put me in mind of The Amityville Horror, immediately followed by a description of swarming flies. Surely this was an intentional reference, but executed in a way that a reader who didn’t pick up on it wouldn’t be missing anything. The second was a description of a different house, describing the house as though it were an entity unto itself, which seemed explicitly like a nod to The Haunting of Hill House. “Oh,” I thought, “Sholfield giving us a Deep South Hill House?” Then, almost with a wink, Part II opens with a quote from the novel, in fact the opening line of the novel: No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. I do like a writer who lets the reader feel clever.

An Intersection of Tales

Most interesting to me about On Sundays, though, is that it almost reads like two stories woven together. The first is a tale of the horrors we all know about or can relate to, to some extent. Abusive families, being trapped and isolated, systemic racism, and the banality of evil. This story opens with Jude having her head slammed against the wall by her mother (who she refers to only as Ma’am) as her aunts ignore what’s happening. Shortly, we learn Jude is not a child but a forty-one-year-old woman who has spent her entire life under the thumb of the domineering mother. This attack was nothing exceptional. I won’t give you the gory details, though gory they are; suffice it to say she escapes Ma’am to disappear for thirteen years before returning. When she returns, she finds that the truth of what she escaped from was more horrifying than she ever knew or perhaps even imagined.

The other story is a supernatural horror story about a woman who escapes her abusive family and finds herself by moving into a haunted house and falling in love with a literal monster. The beast she loves is, pretty clearly I think, a metaphor for nature. Not human nature, which is also a major theme, but the nature outside your door. The kind that we alternately believe takes care of us, and would kill us without batting an eye. “You can’t deny nature,” we are told at one point by Nemoira (who I was briefly convinced was a hallucination, but–spoiler warning, she’s real). At the time, she’s talking about the circle of life: foxes eat rabbits, bears and vultures eat foxes, and that’s just nature. But the implication is deeper; you can’t deny your own internal nature, and nature versus nurture is a false dichotomy. A killer is always a killer.

Avoiding Common Pitfalls

Something that often annoying in stories where city-folk move to the country and largely isolate themselves is that I’m wondering about the everyday things, like how do they get food? How do they have heat and water? and I end up with a broken suspension of disbelief. Some new authors haven’t yet figured out the trick of covering these bases without just giving the reader a boring lore dump. Scholfield has–successfully telling the entire story of Jude’s life there for thirteen years in one-hundred pages without wasting a word.

When I was reading this book, three key themes kept popping up: nature, love, and horror, and how they all relate to one another. Mix them up any way you like: the nature of horror, the horror of nature, the horror of love, the love of nature; with this book, it works.

A Fantastic Debut

On Sunday’s She Picked Flowers is a great debut novel that intrigues as to what Yah Yah Scholfield might produce next. That being said, it’s not perfect. critical characters could use some more character development, as well as the beast. Has it always existed? Are there others like it? I was also expecting more story about the previous inhabitants of the house, who sound interesting but are never expanded upon. Maybe a prequel novel is in the works?

Also, some descriptors of the various hauntings were unnecessary, confusing or more comedic than horrifying; something I don’t think the author was going for.

And remember, kids: Sometimes the only way to break the cycle of abuse is to move to a haunted house in the middle of the Okefenokee Swamp (for those outside the American South, yes, that’s an actual place.)