“All you write about is sex and death!” Flowers Blooming Fire and Fictive Transgressions

I was reminded of Palahniuk’s ‘Guts’ when reading Alexander Kattke’s Flowers Blooming Fire (2024). Like Kattke’s previous book, RedBlackInfinite (2022), Flowers Blooming Fire is similarly indebted to the 90s underground but in a more unrelenting fashion. Relatively short at 47 pages, it feels much more personal than Kattke’s previous work, and indeed is billed as ‘A work of pain and rebirth’. The opening page touches on birth and suicide, with arresting imagery placed front and centre as the author describes ‘the embryotic development period in a womb lined with knives pointing towards me’. (In a strange bit of synchronicity, I’d recently finished reading Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black [2005], in which the medium at the centre of the novel similarly recalls her mother’s attempted termination of her in surprisingly vivid detail.)

Flowers Blooming Fire is relentless and exhausting in its catalogue of atrocities, from rape to necrophilia, and long sentences often add to the sense of assault on the reader. Interspersed with the body horror are critiques of consumerism, social media, and corporate greed. Kattke’s trademark dark humour is also here: I would love to see some tech company develop the photo filter that turns you and your friends into Ed Gein.

Although Flowers Blooming Fire didn’t grab me as much as Kattke’s previous writing, there’s lots here to attract fans of speculative gory fiction (that it reminded me of Palahniuk is surely not a bad thing). Kattke is not simply mired in the muck of his own creation, but has moments of self-criticism and self-reflection that stop the book becoming some literary equivalent of Faces of Death. If there is any grand point to the book beyond the exorcism of personal demons, it is perhaps to lead the reader down their own weird avenues of discovery and remembrance. I pulled Haunted from the shelf for the first time in years, rediscovered the squeamish horror of ‘Guts’, then put it back, wondering how it will fare in another 20 years.