Predatory Natures / Amy Goldsmith / Book Review

PREDATORY NATURES

When Lara Williams is offered the chance to spend her gap year working on a luxury train, she jumps on it. She needs to get away, from her life and her mistakes. She needs a chance to reinvent herself, and there's nothing like getting paid to travel.

Unfortunately, her ex-friend Rhys also got the job. Which Lara doesn't know until they bump into each other on the train. Until it's too late.

Even with the Rhys complication, the train is everything Lara could have hoped: a luxe escape from her routine, demanding customers and all. But when the train pulls into a dark station on the first night of the journey to let on two strange passengers (and attach the two mysterious carriages they insist on traveling with), things take a turn for the... botanical? Because these carriages are full of rare and beautiful plants, as rare and beautiful as the extremely odd (and extremely wealthy) siblings who have come aboard with them...

THOUGHTS

Who needs snakes on a plane when you can have plants on a train? I'm always in the mood for some botanical horror. And this book... has a moment or two. But a lot of the potential here gets lost in the execution.

PROS

Botanical Body Horror	Though this book falls short in a lot of ways, it does have some nice bits of body horror. I don't want to spoil too much, for anyone interested in reading the book itself. But seeds and spores sure can plant themselves in... unfortunate places. Some of these botanical abstractions are gross, in just the right way.
Train Travel	Look, I like the train. I love the train. I love being on the train. I love watching the world go by while seated on the train. I love not having to drive myself, because the train can take me where I need to go. I love not having to waste hours in the liminal space of an airport because the train's already waiting at the station. Boo to you if you don't like trains. And this book, well, this book is very much about trains. There's just something so enchanting, even in horror like this, about barreling through the Bavarian wilderness as creeping plants weave their way through the historic panels of a luxury train.
Locked Room Mystery	This is an off-peak luxury train taking disused routes across the continent. There's no help to be found, not even when the train crew decides to stop the train. Even stopped, there's no way out but onward... There's no way off. There's no way out. There's nobody to call for help, because there's no signal. And in the wilderness, plants reign supreme. When train-mates start dropping, when they disappear, well, there's just the sense that absolutely nothing good is coming out of any of this. And I loved that.

CONS

The biggest problem is the way this book prioritizes backstory. I like a good backstory as much as the next reader (though whether this backstory counts as "good" is quite debatable), but this book jumps back into time so frequently to a backstory that is, quite frankly, less-than-interesting that the tension of the current-day botanical horror slowly withers away. It's unfortunate. Maybe if I had liked the backstory more it would have worked, but even then, I think that there's just too much time spent looking backward that any tension just goes to the wayside.	Plotting Problems
Content Warning with this one, I suppose, but this book does touch on the subject of partner abuse. And the way it does so... is very on-dimensional. I don't know. I just never believed she liked the guy in question enough to get tangled up in him at all, let alone to an emotionally vulnerable state. Everything about him, about their relationship, is so black-and-white that it's not a useful depiction at all because it isn't, well, a real one.	One Dimension
As much as I liked the atmosphere of the train (and the general idea behind the plot here), there really isn't a lot of tension happening on the train. Part of that is the timeline jumps that I mentioned above. Another part is that everything just sort of drags. Which is incredible, given how condensed the actual timeline is here. Everything just keeps chugging along, and that... doesn't make for a great plot.	Lackluster

Rating

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
5/10

Fans of Rin Chupeco's The Sacrifice will like the creeping vines of this new botanical horror. Those who loved Wake the Bones by Elizabeth Kilcoyne will like the eldritch entities being summoned forth from this wilderness.

Details Publisher: Delacorte Press Date: July 8, 2025 Series: N/A Add to Goodreads Buy it HERE

Note: I was provided with an ARC by the publisher through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions here are my own.