Starring in two hot novels in the past six months suggests that the Minnesota vegetable is on a hot streak. Louise Erdrich’s “The Mighty Red” was set in a town dependent on beets, with a prominent character whose best thinking occurred while she hauled them in her truck (Erdrich has written about the crop before and even named “The Beet Queen” after it). Now comes the debut novel by Margie Sarsfield, which takes a deeper dive — literally, it turns out — into the species whose scientific name is “Beta Vulgaris.”

It’s a horror novel, although not in the sense of Stephen King or Grady Hendrix. It’s all about psychology, tunneling deep into the troubled brain of Elise, who is losing her grip as she and boyfriend Tom toil on a sugar beet farm in fictional Robber’s Bluff, Minn. They quickly fall in with a group of itinerant workers in interactions that reveal Elise has struggled with depression, eating disorders and self-harm.

As Elise thinks to herself, “Strangers were just people who didn’t yet know they didn’t like her.”

It’s a funny/painful book, full of observations that grow darker as Elise loses touch with reality. The journey recalls Jennifer Kent’s “The Babadook” or Ari Aster’s “Midsommar,” in that there are no monsters in “Beta Vulgaris.” Sarsfield knows the scariest forces are within us and that it may not take much — a shaky relationship here, a soul-crushing job there — to unleash them. (All those movie references may seem odd in a book review but they’re appropriate because the images in “Beta Vulgaris” are so vivid.)

Sarsfield’s witty, devastating writing plants the seeds (sorry/not sorry) of terror on the farm early. We’re aware, in ways that even Tom isn’t, of cracks in his relationship with Elise, who is terrible with money and anxious about almost everything. We’re also likely to notice that people are disappearing from the beet farm before this captures the attention of Elise and her co-workers, who are surprisingly lackadaisical about friends taking off without telling anyone. Then, Sarsfield ramps things up with scenes like this, as Elise works on a machine called a beet piler:

“Elise frowned, looked down at her feet where the dirt had fallen. It wasn’t dirt. It was a ball of braided worms, struggling against each entwined other. The worms had nothing to say to Elise, although she listened close just to see. Worms can’t talk, said the beets.”

Yep, the beets talk to Elise. Is that because she is becoming a beet? Is she so alienated that she thinks beets are her only friends? Can she no longer distinguish between the real world and what filters through her unreliable brain? Is she just really good at farming? “Yes” to all but the last of these possibilities.

Beta Vulgaris (Norton)

“Beta Vulgaris” is disturbing, for sure, but also beautiful in its insistence on that old saw, “Nothing human is alien.” Sarsfield gives us privileged access to a heart that is hurting, not just because Elise had bad genetic luck but also because she can’t afford the medicines she needs. As readers, we see that Elise has ended up in the wrong place and with the wrong people, even if she can’t.

Beta Vulgaris

By: Margie Sarsfield.

Publisher: Norton 284 pages, $18.99.