Book Review: Doomflower by Jendia Gammon

Jendia Gammon’s Doomflower is a love letter to 1980’s teen high school drama science fiction and disaster movies of the 50’s and 80’s, 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 started 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 1980’s 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 watchers of 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 drama, romance and passions even more into the real 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 a 1980’s disaster and science fiction movie, more on that anon, but the book 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, that it could (even with the technology and speculation) a story that 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 botanical based threat, but also to the fact of Cameilla’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 botanical 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, science fictional elements, and even a paean to cooperation and working together. 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 1980’s 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 1980’s 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 are slowly 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 feel of that movie, that 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 1950’s science fiction/horror in that vibe as well as 1980’s SF Night of the Comet and Weird Science. Sure, the 1950’s movies (Hello Day of the Triffids. Hi there, This Island Earth. Greetings to The Blob) don’t generally have teenagers as major protagonists, but the sense of campy and over the top science fiction horror threat is something that channels from those movies into this novel via the aforementioned 80’s movies, and into this novel, directly. Those movies, though, often have rather stock and flat characters without any real growth, they are there to be menaced and attacked and face the threat.

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, that is feared and loved in equal measure, and she 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 artificially intelligent refrigerator than anyone else in the book. And then there is that enemies-to-the-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 80’s movies that this book is a love letter to, and a tradition since.

And then there is Cameilla’s relationship with her mother. Her mother is dead, and her mother’s death, and its effects on Camellia, and her mother’s legacy is a through line 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, it gives context, sympathy and complicates the character. Gammon hits us with this early enough in the book that we understand where she is coming from. Gammon also does this with her grandmother (who is from Tennessee back east, It appears that Gammon loves to lay roots in her characters in the region of the country that she grew up in). No coincidence, it turns out that when the botanical based invasion begins, it turns out that it starts in that region of the country.

I’ve alluded to it above but let me confirm again that the novel is pitch perfect. Aside that it is set in the 2020s in terms of technology and the like, this novel could have been a novelization of a 1980’s 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 of this, and Gammon’s writing style, snappy dialogue and word choice make the novel eminently readable. It’s campy, it's got heaps of horror, 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