Book Review: 'What Feeds Below' by Tatiana Schlote-Bonne

Cover of Tatiana Schlote-Bonne’s What Feeds Below — courtesy of Boozhoo Books.

Tatiana Schlote-Bonne’s third novel, What Feeds Below (Boozhoo Books), is immediately engrossing. The narrator, Petra, is likable and big-hearted.

She and the city she lives in survive on tourism. Petra and her bestie Jade give tours of the Void, a miles-deep chasm at the edge of the city where an advanced ancient people lived. It is full of mysterious wonders and it is deadly beyond comprehension.

Eventually, a job goes wrong. Petra, who never wanted this life — she wants to be a doctor — now has to find a way to rescue her much braver, more experienced partner.

With her first two books (Such Lovely Skin and The Mean Ones), Schlote-Bonne has already demonstrated that she can write. Her characters are real, her plots are complicated and compelling. What Feeds Below is a departure from her previous work in a couple ways: it’s a fantasy (or sci-fi) setting, so she’s done a ton of world building. She has also crafted horrifying, detailed plants, animals, fungi and gore. Her descriptions are visceral, tangible and often disgusting.

Is What Feeds Below good? Yes, 100 percent, absolutely. One could run a masterclass on narrative and character arcs, world building and description using this book. Do I recommend What Feeds Below? Well, do you like horror? Body horror? Gore? Do you like being glued to a chair despite having responsibilities? Do you like survival horror and survivalism? Do you like caves and plants and medicine? Dystopia and friendship? If any of this sounds like an experience you want to delve into, then yeah.

The novel itself made me deeply uncomfortable. It had me at work with a bit of nausea, a racing heart and a distracted mind thinking about what happens next and if Petra is going to be OK. I scared my sleeping spouse awake with a gasp. I don’t think I enjoyed the experience, but I couldn’t have been torn away for anything. If I had to stop reading for some reason and couldn’t get back to it for a year, I guarantee I’d be preoccupied by this book the entire time.

I’d like to say that its horrors are removed enough from my reality that it didn’t scare me because I don’t often find myself in caves or wilderness or risking life and limb for a meager paycheck. But two days into reading What Feeds Below I started having nightmares involving misshapen and mutated beasts and plants, and it took another couple of days for those images to leave me alone at night. I didn’t think I was scared. I thought I was clinging onto Petra’s story, stressed on her behalf, but my body, with its nightmares and sustained reactions throughout my day, indicate otherwise.

This book is a masterpiece and, when it inevitably becomes a movie, I will close my eyes through it.

This article was originally published in Little Village’s October 2026 issue.