Book Review: ‘Smothermoss,’ by Alisa Alering

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Book Review: ‘Smothermoss,’ by Alisa Alering

SMOTHERMOSS, by Alisa Alering

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In their deliciously weird debut novel, “Smothermoss,” Alisa Alering flashes us to rural 1980s Appalachia, where two young sisters at odds with each other — and themselves — are drawn into a ******* that turns very strange indeed.

Growing up in a ramshackle house on a mountain, 17-year-old Sheila dreams of escape, or at least a life where their family doesn’t have to forage for mushrooms and dandelions or raise rabbits for the ****. The fantasy seems impossible, especially if “your dad is ***** and your brother is in prison and your mom comes home from the Iron Mountain asylum at 8 in the morning in a wrinkled uniform with dark circles under her eyes.”

If she can’t escape, Sheila would like to disappear. She’s eating less and less, vanishing into herself. The weight of the world and her own self-loathing manifest as a thickly corded rope around her neck that hangs like a noose, invisible to everyone but her. But it catches on things and it drags her down. Worse, it adds a bright new strand with every new teenage humiliation — and maybe too with the unspeakable secrets she swallows, like her forbidden crush on her classmate Juanita and the way the women she sees in magazines make her feel.

She has a 12-year-old half sister, ******, but they’re so different “they don’t even seem to be the same species.” ****** doesn’t care that the kids she goes to school with have decided she’s ****** and smelly, a liar and a thief. She’s preoccupied with drawing grotesquely beautiful monster cards she believes can divine the future, like her own D.I.Y. tarot deck, and pretending to be an action hero fighting imaginary bad guys in the woods.

Until, that is, a real bad guy arrives.

When a ********* bludgeons two hikers to ****** on Sheila and ******’s mountain, he upsets the (super)natural order and unleashes a series of uncanny events that will force the sisters to come together to confront their own monsters — and take down a real one.

From the outset, Alering makes it clear that “Smothermoss” is no straightforward ******-and-coming-of-age story. The novel bristles with dark magic, from Sheila’s rope to ******’s cards and tales passed down through the family. The mountain is both a setting and a character with its own complex mythology and powers. It’s the mountain that senses the ********* is like a “diseased fox” and views the hapless hikers as “rabbit women.”

It’s also overrun with bunnies, both real and supernatural. Some are benign, like the “rabbit-shaped puff” of consciousness that escapes a dying woman; others are more frightening, like the nightmare rabbit doctors Sheila remembers attending her in the hospital. At one point, “bones with swollen cotton tails” sweep Sheila off her feet during a flash flood the mountain unleashes in grief and rage after the *******, but whether the blood-tide of bunnies is real or in Sheila’s mind is unclear. Sheila doesn’t question it and we’re not supposed to either.

The novel has its own peculiar fever-dream logic, especially in the last third, where things get really weird and murky. Plot threads are left frayed and dangling, many mysteries are never resolved, and there are no real answers, which may drive readers craving a more traditional narrative nuts. I suspect Alering doesn’t care. They are following their authorial instincts the same way ****** reads her monster cards: by feeling their way along and letting the beasts of their imagination lead them wherever’s next.

The resulting weirdness does the opposite of weighing down the novel — it elevates it to something that is equal parts gruesome and gorgeous and otherworldly. “Smothermoss” is a compulsive journey through a wild, unknowable landscape and the wilder hearts of young ****** trying to understand themselves, and find their way to each other.

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SMOTHERMOSS | By Alisa Alering | Tin House | 254 pp. | Paperback, $17.95

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