Talking to Plants at the End of the World: Review of Alex Woodroe’s Tatratea

JL George Under Review:Tatratea. Alex Woodroe. CLASH Books, October 2026. Plants are weird. We don’t have room here to relitigate definitions of “the weird” (and really, who wants to?), but one way of thinking about weird fiction is as something that reveals the limits of human perception. It points towards forms of life and ways of being that remain opaque and inaccessible to us, or that disrupt the fixed categories we use to make sense of the world. And plants, when you think about them, do something similar. They occupy a kind of middle ground between inanimate objects and obviously living animals, their relationship to time and movement difficult for our senses to parse. Academics have talked about plants as representing a kind of radical alterity, an otherness which humans can neither understand nor relate to. In Tatratea, Alex Woodroe imagines something different. What if, instead of holding itself separate and foreclosed, that wholly other form of life reached out to us?…

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