Review: ‘Smothermoss’ by Alisa Alering

Alisa Alering. Smothermoss. Portland, Or.: Tin House, 2024. 256 pages. Hardcover. $17.95.

Sheila drags an invisible rope behind her: a noose no one can see around her neck. She constricts and restricts herself in constant awareness of her family’s poverty, her duties as eldest daughter, and the lengths to which she must go to protect her secrets. 

Angie, of course, is Sheila’s opposite. She is ball of kinetic energy like a long-limbed puppy covered in mud, immersed in her own fantasy world inspired by Rambo movies and zombie apocalypses. But Angie too has her secrets—whispered to her by unseen forces and surfacing in her drawings. She channels these images in a trance-like state and creates a set of tarot-like cards that guide her every move…and the lives of those around her. 

When two young women are murdered while hiking the nearby Appalachian Trail, the two sisters become entangled in the ongoing search for the killer roaming their woods. Soon all of their secrets will be brought to the surface. The climax is slow, tension-filled, and orchestrated by forces much older than the human inhabitants of this small mountain community. 

The sisters’ outsider status stems from the family’s poverty, but these protagonists have other traits that set them on the fringes: Sheila struggles with her closeted queerness and disordered eating while Angie is autistic and practically feral. These very real aspects lend gravity to the fantastical elements of the novel and make the sisters come fully alive on the page. 

I devoured Smothermoss over a couple of days, staying up late into the night and underlining line after line of gorgeous writing. Alering’s prose is at turns lyrical and shocking, languid and crackling with suspense. This debut novel is undeniably strange, a literary dark fantasy set in 1980’s Appalachia and in a similar vein to Karen Russell’s swampy magic and Leigh Bardugo’s dark academia horror. There’s more than a touch of the Lovecraftian too, an eldritch reek that reminds me of the fiction podcast Old Gods of Appalachia. The author’s careful attention to the flora and fauna of the region deeply roots the novel in place, seeding the pages with bloodroot and skunk cabbage, foxes and an abundant rabbit motif. In folklore around the globe, rabbits are associated with a wide symbolic range, from fertility to innocence to downright evil. Alering weaves in all of these and the illustrations accompanying each title’s chapter enhance the mythological aspect of the novel. 

A lush, haunting, and compelling read, Smothermoss is the perfect novel to relax with on the banks of a cool stream this summer. Just keep an eye on the deep, dark shadows that are beginning to stretch and awaken just beyond the fern beds. ■