Childhood is its own kind of mythology in Trang Thanh Tran’s sophomore novel, They Bloom at Night (Bloomsbury, March 4). The Philadelphia-born author lived in Louisiana between ages 6 and 14 and drew on experiences of these formative years in painting the Gulf shrimping town of Mercy. Readers’ window into this atmospheric post-apocalyptic setting is Vietnamese American teen Noon, a character in the midst of as much turbulent change as their hurricane-stricken, algae-mutated hometown. Tran, who now lives in Atlanta, Georgia, shared more with Kirkus over Zoom. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

This book is unique in that it’s a post-apocalyptic story where it’s clearly acknowledged that the rest of the world has gone on just the same.

It’s very localized, which speaks to how people treat natural disasters or any type of disaster now. There’s that big outpouring of support at the beginning, all the news outlets are covering it, and then they disappear once you get to the long-term survival of the people who are left rebuilding their lives.

As the climate crisis continues to deepen in our world, we’re seeing more stories of apocalypse precipitated by humans. Do you see They Bloom at Night as a climate change story?

When I set out to write it, I wasn’t necessarily writing a climate change story, but because we are a world that is affected by climate change, it naturally progressed that way. Especially when you’re thinking about the South and how much of the shoreline is disappearing every year because of the rising water, for example. As I developed the story, I felt like I couldn’t write a story about this small shrimping town in the Deep South without connecting it to the environment and what’s actually happening.

What role do you think horror stories play in our lives?

For me, horror is a place you can dig deep into the different fears that you have, all the bad scenarios that you can get into. As a person with anxiety, I have a lot of bad scenarios in my mind, so being able to write them out is a form of catharsis for me. I get to play out the scenario, see how this person survives or doesn’t survive. When I need a pick-me-up, I like to watch Resident Evil or something like that; it comforts me for some reason. You visit these horrors, and then you get to leave.

I know that you are also working on some adult horror fiction. Does your approach to horror change when you’re writing in the adult sphere?

It does. In the adult space, I’m thinking more about how far I can push the premise. Sometimes, when I write YA, I have to stop and ask myself: Is this serving my younger readers? How do I hope this scene connects with them? They’re at a young age, so these things are influential. For some of them, this is their only doorway to other identities, to other lived experiences. Fiction is fun, fiction is fantastical. I want to provide a place that is fun—even if it’s horrifying—for them to read through, to work through. When it’s adult fiction, the fun is almost, How terrible can it be? You don’t have to worry about how they’re doing emotionally at the end as much [laughs].

The book has such a unique take on the monstrous. The red algae reminded me of that zombifying fungus—

The cordyceps, yes!

—and then there are the really original elements of Noon’s family mythology. How did you evolve the fantastical elements of the story?

In Vietnam, especially in smaller towns, there’s a lot of focus on smaller deities; the gods exist in a very localized way. In Vietnamese folklore, there are a lot of stories about mother goddesses—for example, the mother goddess of the forest. So I [started with] a very basic idea of a god, and from there I built up the mythology for Noon’s family, which is that they lived on the water in Vietnam and have now moved to the States but still live on the water. What does that look like? When you think about how your family survives, that also becomes a mythology. I wanted to build this idea that Noon’s family believes in this greater force that has helped them along the way. Nature is so beautiful, yet so terrifying.

Noon experiences gender dysphoria throughout the book, which also ties into the body horror elements of the story.

Dysphoria is a huge part of the story, especially when Noon can’t see themself in the mirror. These elements emerged as I was writing, and then afterwards I looked at the book and [realized] this is actually a story about gender. It’s the body horror of not being able to see who you feel like you truly are, and then there’s a second layer of changing in ways that you and other people don’t completely understand. There is a lot of fear about how your body is presenting, how your body is changing over time.

It’s a weird space, when you’re not a girl but you’re seen as a girl, so you have all these experiences of girlhood. Noon has all these different experiences of being treated like a girl, and being treated like a girl can be kind of horrible! They have to separate how they feel about how girls are treated from how they feel about themself.

Tell me more about Noon’s relationship with Covey [the daughter of their main adversary who becomes an unlikely ally in the story]. There’s romance there, but it’s not defined.

I went back and forth on this. There are versions where they kiss or something like that, but ultimately this felt like the right version. There is romance there, there’s feelings, there’s tension, there’s different things, but the overarching story I was trying to tell was about family and friendship and companionship. Companionship is so important; more important than just kissing someone that you like is having someone who’s gonna stick with you through the bad. Noon and Covey are two people set in their ways, and their families shaped them as people. Even when your family sucks sometimes, there’s still that defensiveness: But they’re my family. Noon and Covey challenge each other, and they work through it to become friends. That felt meaningful by itself. And then also, sometimes an unrequited romance just sticks with you harder [laughs].

The way Noon’s story ends, there’s a lot of in-betweenness, a lot of ambiguity and impermanence.

I don’t want to make any big promises that everything is going to be OK, because a lot of times, things won’t be OK. I think teen readers can handle that kind of ambiguity, because I think they live it now. Things may be terrible, but in the moment, you can still have these small moments of love, these small moments of happiness and feeling right. And they are worth living for.

Ilana Bensussen Epstein is a writer and filmmaker in Boston.