The Girl Who Wants to Take It Home: ‘What Feeds Below’
Tatiana Schlote-Bonne’s YA horror novel What Feeds Below turns an underground ecosystem of carnivorous plants, fungi, and parasites into a test of curiosity, class, and how much Petra trusts her own knowledge.
Content note: What Feeds Below contains graphic body horror, parasitic and fungal infection, predation, injury, and descriptions of damaged bodies.
Petra finds a carnivorous plant and immediately starts thinking about medicine. I was mostly wondering how long it would take the thing to digest a person. Tatiana Schlote-Bonne builds What Feeds Below inside that gap. Her narrator is surrounded by organisms that eat, infect and rebuild human bodies, and she keeps wanting to get closer.
The best parts of the novel make that curiosity both Petra’s greatest skill and the thing most likely to get her killed. Making the dangerous things potentially useful gives Petra a practical reason to keep reaching for them.
Petra and her best friend Jade guide tourists into the “Void,” a huge underground world divided into layers that get deadlier the farther down you go. The visitors have money and come looking for adventure and souvenirs. Petra and Jade are saving for a clinic and greenhouse at the orphanage where they grew up. Petra knows the plants. Jade has the confidence, the muscle, and a much healthier willingness to admit that something might kill them.
Who Goes Down and Why
The class divide shows up early and never really leaves. Tourists get to treat the Void like an experience they purchased. Local kids train to work there. Their money buys better gear, medicine, and a chance of being rescued when something goes wrong. Survival in the Void is materially easier for the people who can pay for it.
Petra's plans come directly out of that reality. She wants to practice medicine because she knows what happens when nobody can get it. When Petra studies something that could kill her, it’s not just a teenager getting excited about a weird plant. She is wondering whether the same thing trying to digest somebody could become medicine back home.
That makes the botany matter beyond creature design. A specimen could be food, medicine, a discovery nobody has documented before. It might help pay for the greenhouse. It also might eat Petra before she figures out which.
An Ecosystem, Not a Menagerie
The Void is at its best when it feels less like a dungeon full of monsters and more like a place that would keep functioning perfectly well if humans never showed up.
Carnivorous plants lure, trap, and break down whatever gets too close. Fungi light the caves and change the bodies they settle into. Some plants react when touched. Others fight back when someone tries to collect them, which becomes a recurring problem when one of your protagonists desperately wants samples of everything.
What makes the Void convincing is that none of these things seem to be waiting around for Petra to arrive. They have their own ways of surviving. Humans walk into that system carrying gear and acting like visitors, but the organisms are not exhibits and do not care who paid to enter.
Petra makes all of this more fun because she wants to understand it. How does something feed? What does it secrete? Could whatever destroys one body save another? Her excitement keeps the Void from becoming a checklist of monsters, even as it repeatedly puts her within touching distance of things that should probably remain untouched.
Fungal Body Horror and Bodies That Stop Being Yours
The fungal horror is where What Feeds Below gets nastiest. Infection can distort perception, behavior, and identity. Death is not always the immediate fear—losing possession of your body might be worse.
Medication and field knowledge help, but neither offers much comfort once something starts going wrong. Petra depends on books written by people who survived long enough to write down what happened. A field guide is only useful when you can remember the right page while something is already happening to your body.
The YA label should not make anyone expect soft horror. There is damaged flesh, parasites, and plenty of predation. Schlote-Bonne gives some of it enough detail that the images hang around after the scene is over. Petra sounds like a teenager. The things happening around her are still disgusting.
Some of the best scares are much simpler. Darkness destroys your sense of distance. A tight passage suddenly makes every step forward feel permanent. Underwater, survival can depend on keeping hold of something that feels much too easy to lose. The characters know what they are doing and still panic. Training helps right up until the body decides it is dying and takes over.
Knowing Things and Trusting Yourself
Petra knows what she’s doing. The book gives us plenty of evidence of that to make her uncertainty believable; what she lacks is confidence in her own judgment when Jade is not there to confirm it.
Their history makes that dependence believable. They have survived enough together that losing the person who stayed feels impossible to contemplate. Jade is Petra's safety net, but the habit of deferring to her turns dangerous in a place where hesitation can get you killed.
That is where the YA framework works best for me. Petra already has the knowledge; the growing-up part is learning to recognize when curiosity becomes recklessness. Eventually there are choices she must make that nobody else can approve for her.
That dependence makes their relationship comforting early on and increasingly uneasy later. Saying much more about that would start stepping into spoiler territory, but the tension between knowing what to do and trusting yourself to do it becomes much more interesting than Petra simply learning how to survive another level of the Void.
Where What Feeds Below Stumbles
Petra is funny, excitable, and constantly talking herself through what is happening. Most of the time that voice keeps the book moving. Sometimes it keeps moving when I want it to stop.
A joke sometimes arrives right after a nasty image, releasing the pressure out of the room. The humor belongs to Petra, so removing it entirely would flatten her. I just wanted Schlote-Bonne to leave a few of the uglier moments sitting there for another beat before Petra started talking again.
The book also has a habit of explaining feelings the reader already understands. Petra's fear, her dependence on Jade, and her lack of confidence are important parts of her character, but occasionally the narration keeps going after the point has already landed.
The foreshadowing can be similarly heavy-handed. A few tensions get highlighted so strongly that Petra becomes the last person in the room to understand them. That doesn't ruin what follows, but waiting for her to catch up can get frustrating. The book is better when actions and small choices tell us what is happening instead.
Wanting to Look
Petra wants to grow things in a place where nearly everything has figured out how to eat something else. I kept coming back to that. Her greenhouse is built on the idea that something discovered in a terrible place can still be turned into something useful.
That is why the Void works. It isn't frightening because everything inside it is ugly or evil. Some of it is beautiful. Some of it gives off light. Some of it might feed people or heal them. Some of it can also turn a human body into lunch.
Petra knows all of that and still wants another sample.
I probably would too.
Article by Luna Gray
Luna Gray is a horror critic, author of No House Is Empty, and senior staff writer at iHorror. She covers cult, indie, folk, queer, and streaming horror, with a particular interest in the strange stories that linger long after the credits roll. Her work can be found at her Substack.
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Petra finds a carnivorous plant and immediately starts thinking about medicine. I was mostly wondering how long it would take the thing to digest a person. Tatiana Schlote-Bonne builds What Feeds Below inside that gap. Her narrator is surrounded by organisms that eat, infect and rebuild human bodies, and she keeps wanting to get closer.