Fungi, Decay, and the Strange Comfort of Kathryn Harlan’s Fruiting Bodies

If you haven’t yet encountered Kathryn Harlan’s short-story collection, you absolutely need to order Fruiting Bodies for the next cozy, rainy weekend on your calendar.

I stumbled onto this beautiful book about halfway through a long drive from Southern to Northern California. I was in the part of the trip where you can’t beat to listen to another song, but the silence stretches out like the long, flat road ahead. If you’ve made that drive, you know the feeling. Since I was behind the wheel, I queued up the audiobook version on Spotify, and the richness of Harlan’s prose washed over me.

The first story in the collection, “Algal Bloom,” is a must-read. It follows two young teenage girls tempted to swim in a lake infected with a toxic algae bloom. Drawn to the forbidden water, they sneak out at night to swim—an act that blurs the line between desire, transformation, and danger. The next morning, dead fish wash onto the shore, and the narrator senses that something has shifted between them, and perhaps within herself, in ways that feel both intimate and unsettling. The story tempts the reader, like the girls themselves, to wade into the waters of fungus, algae, decay, and death.

A fungal motif has been haunting some of my favorite texts over the last few years. I think most immediately of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, a novel that breathes new life into Gothic traditions while giving its heroine far more agency than her genre ancestors. More unexpectedly, I also think of Star Trek: Discovery, which imagines a starship navigating the universe through a vast mycelial network.

What fascinates me is how differently each of these works deploys the world of fungi. In Discovery, the mycelial network becomes a metaphor for cosmic interconnectedness. It imagines a universe in which we are connected through a system that is scientific, expansive, and almost utopian in its reach. In Mexican Gothic, the fungus represents something far more sinister: the rot beneath society’s surface, the lingering stink of patriarchy, colonialism, and hoarded power.

Harlan’s collection offers something quieter, more intimate. Her fungi don’t expand the universe or threaten to overrun it; instead, they reflect the small, private deaths that shape a life: the deaths of childhood, of friendship, and of unspoken longing. These stories remind us that decay is not always catastrophic or visible. Sometimes it’s the slow dimming of a conversation, the soft closing of a door, the moment you realize a version of yourself has dissolved quietly in the dark.

Harlan’s work resonates with me right now as I continue to listen to the text on Spotify. I'm used to devouring books, but I want to savor this one. I’ve been moving through my own recent cycles of loss and endings, and her stories sit with that sense of quiet dissolution instead of turning away from it. Fungi grow by feeding on dead matter; from a human perspective, that can feel grim. But there’s also something profoundly honest about it. Life and death aren’t opposites. They’re a cycle, a relay. Finding beauty in that process draws us closer to ourselves, and maybe to each other.

What about you? Have you read any books lately that take up the worlds of fungi, rot, or decay? I’d love to hear what’s been haunting your shelves.