Lewiston Sun Journal crime reporter Mark LaFlamme may be intrepid when he’s hanging around gritty downtown streets. But take him out into a garden sometime and watch him quiver.
LaFlamme recently published Vegetation, the story of a wealthy, pompous man who kills his wife and enrages the entire world of plant life. Everywhere poor Bertram Luce turns, he finds himself under attack from one form of flora or another.
The inspiration for the novel?
“I was wandering around my backyard sometime after midnight, just pacing back and forth and looking up at the moon, when something cool slithered around my ankle,” LaFlamme says. “I’m pretty sure I screamed like Jamie Lee Curtis and I started to run. I ran headlong into a lilac bush and that’s when I really got to screeching.”
The backyard ghoul that tickled his ankle later proved to be a garden variety ivy. It also illustrated to LaFlamme that when you offend the kingdom of plants, the whole world really is out to get you.
“There is just no end to the ways they can get you,” he says. “The more I wrote, the more inventive the plants became in their assault on Bertram Luce. I should never admit how much I enjoyed torturing that poor soul.”
The toughest part of writing the novel, LaFlamme says, was research. Knowing little about even common plants, he spent his spring hanging around greenhouses and extreme gardening with his wife Corey.
“Now if some man-eating plant attacks me in the backyard,” LaFlamme says, “at least I’ll be able to identify it as it drags me down.”
