Stephen King's latest work is an epistolary fiction - the characters write letters, memos, notes, all on bits of paper, and the novel is those bits of paper, collected together. What they reveal is at first amusing but, by the end of episode one, is turning nasty.
Most of the letters are written by John Kenton, a well-educated malcontent working for a lowbrow publisher, caressing the decidedly unliterary authors of Zenith House.
Kenton laughs at the creepy and absurd Carlos Detweiller, who writes proffering his typescript of True Tales of Demon Infestations. Detweiller writes about attending covens and working in a flower shop. "I am very good with plants" - the sign of horrors to come (there is a hint that Kenton's fiancee is a botanist, which will presumably be useful later).
What is mildly appealing about this first instalment of The Plant is that sense of the funny becoming the not-so-funny, the oddbod becoming a monster. Detweiller is a laughable eccentric, but rejected authors can turn nasty. And those photos he sends with his ill-written typescript do seem to show something truly terrible . . .