This Mycelium-Like Novel Took Its Time

It’s been more than a decade since I published a book

Available as print, ebook, and audiobook

It’s been a long time since I officially published a full-length book. And those were scholarly books and essays focused on television and film: analysis, theory, close reading. It’s still work that I am proud of.

But this book is different. It’s my first novel! *Song of the Unsung Mushroom* is a coming-of-age science fiction tale; it’s a book that grew insistently alongside everything else I was doing. It’s about the secret languages of fungi and the hidden intelligence pulsing beneath our feet. Nature and technology blur together here, reshaping what it means to be human.

At its heart, it’s the story of siblings, Claire and Gunther, growing up in a small Florida town, clinging to one another after the death of their parents, until the day of the hurricane. That’s when Claire disappears and when she returns that night, she’s not the same. Years later, Gunther is haunted by the feeling that his sister didn’t just change, but was taken and replaced by something not quite human. His search for answers pulls him into an underground world of rogue biotechnologists and a clandestine experiment that fuses human DNA with a rare fungal species.

The story unfolds in alternating perspectives, moving between northern Florida and western Appalachia, between what was lost and what has grown in its place. Claire, meanwhile, struggles to uncover her family’s connection to the SubRez movement and to understand her own shifting sense of self.

Song of the Unsung Mushroom is about the incredible magic of mycelial networks and their potential powers, but it’s also deeply personal. It’s about loss, identity, and familial love. If my academic work taught me how to analyze stories, this book reminded me why I wanted to tell them in the first place. It’s a book rooted in place, especially the wild, humid, fragile beauty of Florida, and I hope you will check it out!

Publishing fiction after years of academic work feels both risky and exhilarating. It’s a return, in some ways, to an earlier version of myself. Available on Kindle, Audible, hardcover, and paperback!