Weird, just like I like ‘em! I read this during a depressing winter which was a perfect time to make it feel really real. Being inside Elise’s head was not a fun place to be but it was intriguing. The author did an incredible job of making me feel as if I were experiencing what Elise was experiencing. I loved the endings but I was hoping for a bit more action before the big finale. I’m eagerly looking forward to more from Margie Sarsfield!
Thank you to NetGallery and W.W. Norton & Company for letting me read!

Beta Vulgaris by Margis Sarsfield is an interesting work of speculative fiction, sounding compelling from the initial synopsis. Longtime partners Elise and Tom leave their comfortable Brooklyn apartment, on a whim, in hopes of hitting rich in as temp workers in a Minnesota sugar beet farm. Seems easy enough. That is, until people start to disappear. While this work isn't really a mystery, I felt whoever wrote the synopsis really over-hyped the "what's actually going on?" aspects of the narrative, which, in reality, wasn't ever truly stated.

The sense of setting, while superficially seeming minor, actually painted a compelling picture of sugar beet farms and those manning them. Unfortunately, I had issues with many other aspects of the work: the lack of a trigger warning inside the work for ED--Ana/Mia, calorie-counting/inventory—as someone who struggled with disordered eating, I would've like to know the main character would randomly start noting caloric values, sharing too much summary of Pretty Little Liars episodes watched by the main character, and the sentence, "The night ended in the morning, as it generally did." Little is followed up on the random woman calling and harassing Elise's phone, what happens to the characters who disappear (though we can wildly speculate), and how we leave our heroine.

The concept was there, but it definitely could have been delivered in a better way. Whether the author should've considered utilizing a different POV(s), considered evolving the beets and the farm, or considered being clear about the decay readers were already opening up the book to, is hard to say. Events and catching up to the "truth" happened randomly and felt like an info dump to catch the reader up to where the story was swiftly ending.

Overall, I think this is a good start and the storyteller has a lot of potential to grow.

Thank you, NetGalley and the publisher, for an e-ARC of this work.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Genre: Horror

When I came across the cover of this book on NetGalley, I was immediately intrigued. After reading the synopsis, my interest grew even more, prompting me to request an ARC, which I was pleased to be approved for. The story follows a young woman in her 20s named Elise, who is from Brooklyn. She travels with her boyfriend, Tom, to Minnesota to participate in the sugar beet harvest.

They're just looking to make some quick cash and snag some free meals before heading back to Brooklyn. Elise is really tight on money, but Tom, who's from a rich family, won’t even think about asking for help. At least that's what he wants Elise to think.

At the beet farm, the couple meets a friendly group of seasonal workers, including Sam and his girlfriend, Cee, whom Elise totally admires. But things get tough when Elise has to deal with the rough weather and her supplies running low. It gets even more stressful when she notices a weird charge on her credit card, which just adds to the friction between her and Tom.

When Elise's eating disorder kicks in, she starts seeing things and hearing weird stuff, like the beets talking to her. As everything spirals out of control, Tom and Cee disappear, making Elise confront how wobbly her grip on reality really is.

This is a slow-moving, character-driven story. The pace is a bit slow, so it might not be your cup of tea. I wouldn’t categorize it as a traditional horror story because all the horror occurs within the main character’s mind. The book features an atmospheric setting, and while the plot is quite bizarre, it is intriguing in a good way.

Since the narration is presented in the first-person perspective, readers experience everything through the main character's point of view, causing a blurring between reality and imagination. The author effectively captures the main character's vivid hallucinations and vulnerabilities. I believe this author has created a solid debut novel. This is one of those books that you need to explore on your own to truly appreciate it and discover how much you enjoy it.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with the ARC of this book.

i'm going to be entirely honest with you - i'm not sure what i just read.

please don't go into this one expecting horror the way that i did. or, perhaps, if you go into it understand there's no tangible horrors, just the way our main character elise talks about her relationship, her body, her poverty.

so, to be clear - elise is a character with very little money in her bank account, dating a man called tom, a trust fund baby who is morally opposed to using his wealth for survival. the dynamic off the bat is insufferable. elise is in a constant state of fretting about money. she's got just north of 100 dollars in her bank account and instead of discussing it with her partner she hides her truth and spends through it, watching the number dwindle down.

together, elise and tom are headed to a beet farm where they'll harvest beats over a short period of time. the money they make will ensure rent for several months and elise is desperate for that.

elise has a LARGE amount of body issues. i mean, large. i don't even get the impression that she's that large but we're subjected to her constantly counting the calories of every single thing that she consumes and things that she doesn't. she'll ignore healthy meals to eat a plate of lettuce (20 calories). if you're a person with triggers related to eating disorders, i would steer clear of this one. there's also a point where she ends up binging in a big way and it was pretty unsettling to read.

if the unlikable characters don't sway you away, you may really enjoy this if you love surrealism where you understand that there's something happening, but you're not entirely sure what it is. surrealism is an area that i've struggled with in fiction. i didn't find much of a reason or resolution in this book, just that this was one character's descent into madness with a healthy dose of fatphobia, both internalized and not. i'm just not sure what i was meant to get out of it.

i think if i'd gone into this expecting something more literary, i'd have had a better time.

Beta Vulgaris
Margie Sarsfield

4.25 / 5

*I received this e-book, with gratitude, as an ARC, and all opinions are my own.*

Ok, so ...
I can't believe how many times beet pilers have come to mind in the week since I finished this one. 😳
A tale of loneliness and intense mental illness, Beta Vulgaris managed to balance that line between empathy and exploitation without ever crossing it.
This book will live rent free in the recesses of my mind for the rest of 2025. And I don't know how to feel about that. 😂
Raw as a flayed nerve, it's unhinged and unfiltered to its core. hard for me to just classify this as horror .... Maybe more weird horror lit-fiction.
It's unhinged and unfiltered to its core, as long as you're not a sensitive reader, I'd highly recommend you checking out this debut banger by Margie Sarsfield. It's insanely intense and horrific, while remaining intensely (and horrifically) human.

4.25 / 5

Reminiscent of Moshfegh and Awad. It also reminded me of my favourite Josh Malerman story CARPENTER FARM.

Elise & her bf land themselves a gig picking sugar beets on a remote farm. Elise is the epitome of an anxiety ridden sad-girl. When her coworkers start disappearing, (including her boyfriend), she feels a connection with the beets that builds her up in a way she’s never felt before.
Wild. Weird. Wowsome! A brilliant debut!

A psychological, surreal, body horror novel focusing on a young woman, Elsie, working at graveyard shift at a Midwestern sugar beet farm. Great premise—the opening pages are from a beet-level perspective—but I felt like the writing was either effortful or very plain, and some of the surrealism landed as goofy rather than sinister.

I liked its economic stakes and non-NYC setting, and I'm sure this book will appeal to readers of Elle Nash and Mona Awad.

This was such an intriguing take on horror. I knew nothing about sugar beets or the harvesting of them. But now that I do it’s pretty horrifying.

Unreliable narrators are my favorite and I loved the main character Elise. Definitely flawed, but endearing. Overcoming an eating disorder, bad financial decisions and low self esteem, she decides to make money in the seasonal work of the sugar beet harvest. Along with her boyfriend, Tom, who I hated. Workers start to disappear and things get really weird. Like peanut butter and American Cheese sandwich weird.

Still thinking on the ending, but overall really enjoyed the unique universe.

For fans of unreliable narrators and eco horror.

Thank you very much to W. W. Norton & Company and NetGalley for the ARC.

Elsie is a broke, anorexic, depressed and wannabe New Yorker and her partner Tom is a trust fund kid that doesn't wanna touch that money cause it's just not punk. Together they spend their last few bucks to drive to Minnesota to be seasonal beet harvesters and to save money.

Okay, I apparently love reading from POV of unstable women!

It is weird, eerie, harrowing and very unhinged. I loved the writing and story so much! Can't wait to buy a copy of the book for my personal library once it is published!

Oh my god, this was a weird one. And I loved it so much. I've been looking forward to Beta Vulgaris since I first saw the cover in November, maybe? I'm ecstatic to say that it did not disappoint by any measure. I'm so glad that this was my first read of the year. There were so many things that I loved about this book. The main character, Elise, was the perfect narrator in my opinion. She's insufferable in a way that's too relatable. I really enjoyed her internal monologue, especially as the situation got more intense. The details in this book are so specific that it felt like the author had to have experienced something similar. I don't know what inspired Margie Sarsfield to write about a sugar beet harvest gone wrong, but I'm so glad that she did. I would absolutely read anything new that she reads. 5 stars. Thank you so much to NetGalley and to W.W. Norton and Company for the ARC.

Wow. I cannot believe that this is a debut! I was hooked from the first page as the writing style really clicked for me. Elise as a main character is very interesting, but also can be difficult to read from. I love a book that feels like a character study and the subtle horror in the background of it all was chefs kiss. I would recommend checking triggers before going into this one as there are many topics that could be difficult for some readers. If you are into weird, unhinged books, this is for you!

Beta Vulgaris is a blend of weird fiction and psychological horror. It was a bleak and odd read. The story is mainly about the horror that occurs in this woman’s mind.

This is a strange book that kind of felt like an A24 film. I’m still not sure how I feel about it. I do know after reading this, I’ll never look at a beet the same way again.

I thought the main character was very complex and interesting. She had a lot to deal with throughout the story. She’s in a relationship with a man who does not really want to be with her, she doesn’t have much money which causes her to sometimes rely on her rich boyfriend, she feels alone and depressed, she hates her body, and she hates herself. It was difficult to read from her perspective. I could relate to some of her feelings.

I thought the writing style was very unique. It felt poetic in a way. I look forward to reading more from this author in the future.

I would recommend this to fans of weird horror fiction.

Thank you to the publisher for providing an eARC of this book via NetGalley for review.

3.5
This book is an entire acid trip. Absolutely not what I was expecting horror wise. Overall, I think this is better described as a quiet psychological horror. We spend the story inside the mind of Elsie as she embarks on a journey to make some money. The story is a deep dive into her inner struggles with her self image, relationships, mental health, an eating disorder, and her dark decent into a beet infested oblivion.
In the end, we are our own worst enemy.
Thank you netgalley and the publisher for the arc!

Beta Vulgaris by Margie Sarsfield was a bit of a wild, anxious ride with a great cover. The story starts with our broke protagonist and her boyfriend driving from NYC to work on an annual beet harvest in the Midwest. I didn't catch how they found out about it and got the job, but I don't think it mattered. I flew through the book, half enjoying how it was written and half wanting to get to the end and see how everything resolves itself.

There's a great cast of seasonal worker characters that could have all had their own stories, and the setting is brought to life in all of its cold, grey monotony that can be autumn in the north. I can confirm that I have no desire to work any beet harvest.

Elise and Tom travel from home in Brooklyn to spend a season harvesting beets in Minnesota. But it is not as Elise expected. She has no money, she is falling back into her old eating disorder patterns and then people start disappearing. Reality is thrown into question as the novel is told from Elise’s point of view, and I’m not sure if she is a reliable narrator.

This book was slow paced, which I usually don’t enjoy because I get antsy waiting for something big to happen. But the slow pace helped the surreal tone of the novel. Elise is a well developed character, with many layers and a definitive background. Overall the tone was creepy and atmospheric in a good way.

I have seen this book referred to as horror, a genre I generally stay away from. This novel, however, is a psychological horror story which was much more terrifying to be honest. The human mind can be a scary thing. I was looking forward to reading this novel and it did not disappoint!

This novel is asphyxiating. It is all flayed skin and raw nerves, a type of suffering that is only experienced through intimacy. There is no real plot to speak of, but instead a character study of a young woman suffering from mental illness without the necessary supports to keep herself afloat. It reminded me, not in specific themes or ideas, necessarily, but in vibes, as a combination of Iain Reid’s novel "I’m Thinking of Ending Things" and Coralie Fargeat’s film "The Substance."

It is classified as horror, which might be a little misleading. The story is certainly horrific, a series of car accidents lined up one after another, which the reader can naught but witness, no matter how far in the distance you may see the accidents coming. The whole story follows the character of Elsie, and we are there with her small joys and victories, at the beginning, always overshadowed by her constant insecurity and anxiety. As her life and experiences spiral out of control we are along for the ride, the writing keeping us in a profound intimacy, one that parallels the disorientation she constantly experiences. There are a handful of other characters, though all of the ancillary characters are colored and shaped by Elsie’s experience of them, the roles she assigns them in her life. Because of this they are not incredibly deep, and yet they are memorable, they feel like genuine characters, even when filed down to the singular focus Elsie gives them.

Elsie is complicated and messy and feels all too genuine. Her past and her present and all of the voices telling her the ways she is nothing but a disappointment to everyone, herself included, everything feels painfully real. Bad decision after bad decision you may feel frustrated with her, so close to pulling herself out of the hole she just keeps digging, but at the same time all of her decisions make sense for her character. This slow-motion breakdown is set amidst really great world-building. The ethereality of seasonal work, the very lack of substance that it embodies, works really well. The environments, from the campground to the soup kitchen to the worksite, they all feel dirty and tangible, slowly building a picture of the particular assortment of circumstances that can push Elise farther away from herself than she has been before, a distance we wait with bated breath to see if she can return from.

This story isn’t particularly fun to read, in a conventional sense. But it is incredibly compelling and heartbreaking, in equal measures. It is expertly written, with prose that really situates you in the troubled and untrustworthy mind of the main character, and while you may not feel good when the story ends you will likely feel transformed, in some small way.

I want to thank the author, the publisher W. W. Norton & Company, and NetGalley, who provided a complimentary eARC for review. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Big thanks to W. W. Norton & Company for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

I've seen this on a lot of lists people have for horror novels they're looking forward to in 2025, so I applied for an ARC when I saw it listed. I'm very into the unhinged women subgenre that's gotten popular the last number of years, and when that's combined with horror tones, I'm all for it.

Unfortunately, I found this book to be mostly disappointing. It becomes fairly repetitive by the time you hit the halfway mark, and the ending is incredibly abrupt and without resolution or explanation for a lot of the plot devices. It runs very stream of consciousness, but oddly it's not written in first person. I was thrown off a number of times by parts in it that felt... Pandering, for lack of a better term. I'm a leftist myself, but the chunks where the main character is for no real reason contemplating if they're racist or not, having vague half baked thoughts on class and capitalism, or touching on gender and sexuality all seemed fairly out of place because the thoughts didn't much lead anywhere, which made it feel performative. There was also an embarrassing amount of mentions of "crust punks," "train kids," "free bleeders," "emo kids," etc, but not in a way that felt relatable. Between that and name dropping random bands, it just felt out of place and awkward.

Overall there are some weird parts that were interesting, and the execution wasn't a complete bust. I'm not sure there was enough horror in it to merit even calling it psychological horror. I don't think it was much for me, but it was something to read I guess.

Beta Vulgaris tells the story of a young woman who works as a seasonal worker. Her work takes a bizarre, delightful turn and she is forced to contend with wild surprises. Overall, this was an engaging debut.

While listed as a horror, this is more a horror of the psychological kind. There were elements of traditional horror throughout, but as the reader we did not explore them beyond surface level. Throughout the book we follow Elise through her spiral of anxiety, self-doubt, and a raging eating disorder. The psychological horror builds in such a way it makes the reader uneasy if they allow themselves to be fully immersed in the story.

If you in any way identify with Elise or her characteristics, this one will make you squirm.

3.5/5 rounded up

Elise and her boyfriend Tom’s journey to the Midwest in search of financial relief serves as the story’s foundation. Still, it quickly becomes clear that this is no ordinary tale of economic struggle. The sugar beet fields are rendered with an oppressive and otherworldly atmosphere: the grueling physical labor, the desolate setting, and the underlying sense that something is wrong. As Elise begins to experience strange occurrences—threatening calls, an inexplicable rash, and the unsettling whispers emanating from the beet piles—the novel tightens its grip, turning the ordinary into something deeply menacing.

At the heart of Beta Vulgaris is Elise, a protagonist whose anxieties about her financial instability and personal failures are all too relatable. Her psychological and physical unraveling mirrors the novel’s broader themes of class, trauma, and consumption. The disappearance of Tom and other workers leaves Elise isolated, forcing her to confront the horrors that feel both external and internal. This isolation heightens the novel’s tension, as readers are left to question what is real and what might be the product of Elise’s crumbling state of mind.

The novel’s premise—a siren song emanating from the sugar beets—could have veered into absurdity, but it works remarkably well here, thanks to the author’s confident and incisive prose. The beets become a symbol of unchecked consumption and decay, their irresistible and destructive lure.

Through Elise’s haunting journey, the novel explores the physical and psychological toll of economic precarity and how trauma can consume and distort. The result is a story that lingers long after the final page—thought-provoking and profoundly eerie.

The publisher provided ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.