Tatratea Book Review
by Catalina Bonati
3.5/5 stars ★★★⯪☆
Tatratea by Alex Woodroe (to be published October 2026) is a short ecohorror post-apocalyptic novella about Errata, a woman who has been trained by The Mothers to find the source of the mental insanity plague that has taken over the world and decimated the population. She arrives at an old wellness center named Tatratea and is quickly confronted by animate plants who wish to enlist her help in defeating an evil, blurring the boundaries between reality and hallucination.
The idea of a “mind plague” and the search for its medicinal cure or its source is quite intriguing. Errata arrives at Tatratea as a botanical investigator, searching for radioactive plants and anything that might somewhat pinpoint the source of the plague. She finds what she is looking for while making unlikely plant friends. The plants (named Flora) delve into the uncanny—they take a humanoid form of fruits and flowers, reminding of The Four Seasons painting series by Giuseppe Acrimoldo, and are themselves victims of a more terrible force and have a desire for protecting the natural environmental order. Indirect references to COVID are plentiful.
This plant horror novella takes place in an unknown location in Eastern Europe. It almost takes the written form of a found footage ecohorror film, since Errata spends her time narrating her discoveries to a voice recorder intended for those who might find her body. She comes from what appears to be an investigative monastery, where nuns find recruits who will research places where mysterious natural occurrences began to take place right before the mind plague happened. Errata often does something called a “sanity check”, which entails counting fingers, reading text, telling the time, and other things, in order to tell if one is hallucinating or in reality. However, realistically the sanity check is not reliable, as these things can be different yet be perceived as normal during a hallucination, so this is a bit of a plot hole. The novella also includes botanical illustrations (presumably by the author, as there is no artist credited) that are nice to see, but have no relation to what is happening in that scene. At times, the descriptions of what is happening to Errata are a bit vague, which is what happens during the climax of the book.
The novella has no real conclusion and is sculpted towards a sequel or perhaps a series, which is a bit annoying to experience. All books, even as part of a series, should have conclusions, be they solid or open-ended, and this has neither. It is followed by a short story, “Adrift”, which is an expansion of the same world but through the lens of a minor character with an interesting storyline in the main novella, which is an interesting addition. Overall, this book is recommended to readers of post-apocalyptic stories, ecohorror, and found footage enjoyers.
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