May Flowers...Blood and Roses

"April showers bring May flowers" and I thought it might be interesting to blog about flowers this month and how flowers relate to dark fiction in general. Naturally, the first flower that comes to mind when I think of dark fantasy and flowers is the rose. I always liked "Blood and Roses" by the Smithereens (wonder what happened to them) and have a story in a collection of tales of the same name. (the collection is not available on Amazon.com, but the there are a slew of titles that use "blood" and "rose" in them.

There's also a "Blood and Roses" forum community that's connected to a series of paranormal books.  (roses are almost as integral to vampire lore as garlic and crucifixes, which is interesting because in religious iconography, the rose is Mary's flower. It's also associated with Muslim lore and poetry and is also the city symbol of  Islamabad, Pakistan.

I remember reading Margaret Truman's cozy mysteries set in DC an dfor some reason thought that she'd done a "Murder in the Rose Garden" title, but she didn't. (Here's a list of all her books.)  There's an Ellis Peters "Brother Cadfael" mystery called The Rose Rent. there's also a novel called The Blue Rose, that's part of an English Garden Mystery series.  there's just something very mysterious about blue roses, probably because they don't exist in real life. (There are breeders who are getting close but they're not there yet.)  But blood roses just seem dark and strange. Check out this blood rose image by Trivalia.