The last book I read by Melissa Faliveno was her collection of personal essays called Tomboyland. I loved that book. It holds new weight four years later when the assault on queerness continues at a national scale. I imagine for many queer youth, life in towns like Mt. Horeb (and indeed even cities like Madison or Milwaukee) today remains challenging and fraught with assumptions and prejudices from people who can’t be bothered to understand.
Her latest book, Hemlock, is a gothic novel set in Northern Wisconsin. Maybe we’re calling this Boreal Gothic? Sam grew up going to the northwoods as a child, but eventually life took her to New York City and eventually included her partner, Stephen, and cat, Monster. Something calls her back to her family’s cabin in Wisconsin, Hemlock, built by her father and neglected after her mother died three years after her mother mysteriously vanished into the woods.
Faliveno foreshadows early in the novel that a darkness lurks in Hemlock. The darkness that took her mother, smothered her father in grief, and goes by the name of alcohol. Strange things begin to happen to Sam’s reality. A doe begins to talk to her at the trough she set up for feeding. She wakes up in the woods. Bloody footprints stain the cabin floor.
I liked this book, and despite its flaws, I’m glad I read it and largely agree with the praise it’s received from more professional reviewers. This is a debut novel worthy of your time by an author who deserves your support. Go buy it, or check it out from your local library.
Any novel requires some suspension of disbelief. In this novel, it comes from the depictions of Northern Wisconsin’s human geography. Intentional exaggeration of the population and circumstances helps Faliveno setup a classically gothic setting but it’s unintentionally overdone. There were also times reading the book where I found myself thinking: I get it Fali, Sam is in Vilas County, quit telling me and start just being there! Some of that may be due to the close-third person perspective. A first person point of view could have helped with both of these problems; it could make clear these are Sam’s specific observations, not the author’s broad generalizations.
Another issue is timing. The book establishes it’s been three years since her mother’s disappearance, but probably less than that since Sam or her father last visited Hemlock. It felt like both too little and too much time to elapse between her mother’s death and the present. Unless someone was care-taking for her father, a 40 year old pick up truck would absolutely need it’s battery and fuel replaced after sitting cold for that long. Hemlock would have an uninhabitable rodent problem, and Sam’s priority for repair would tend toward the structural, not the cosmetic.
I also think Sam would be more familiar with the place after such a short time. Sam’s experience often made me feel like I was returning to my grandpa’s cabin in Aitkin County, MN — a place I haven’t visited since shortly after he died 16 years ago. Maybe it all would have cohered a bit more if the timeline were compressed: It’s been almost a year and her father still can’t bring himself to return. Or lengthened: In the last decade, Hemlock was basically maintained, but neglected by family who really care.
Still there is plenty to love in this book. The construction of addiction as a cryptid lurking in the woods is a particular stroke of brilliance. It that might devour you, turn you into a predator, or make you vanish into thin air. Or it may not exist at all. It’s certainly a powerful metaphor for how it feels to watch a friend or loved one suffer addiction.
Though they are both about addiction, Hemlock is a micro-level tale without the scale of Demon Copperhead. In this book we watch a person unravel over a matter of months, surrounded by almost nobody, and fully aware of what’s happening. Sam has, or thinks she has, nobody to pretend to love her. Nobody but herself to feed her demon. The people who genuinely do love her are hundreds or thousands of miles away. Sam makes choices throughout the book she’ll live with for the rest of her life.
I’m not sure I want to read another book about addiction this year, but I’m glad Danielle dropped this one on my nightstand. It’s a strong first novel from a writer I suspect I’ll continue to admire for a long time.