Smothermoss by Alisa Alering: Review by Colleen Mondor

Smothermoss, Alisa Alering (Tin House 978-1-959-03058-4, $17.95, tp, 256pp) July 2024.

Alisa Alering’s debut novel Smothermoss is a master class in conveying both a physically and psychologically oppressive atmosphere. Set in a small rural Appalachian town in the early 1980s, the novel follows the tough adventures of sisters Sheila and Angie. At seventeen years old, Sheila is acutely aware of her ‘‘otherness,’’ a kid all too often bullied and abjectly poor, living with her brother imprisoned and her father long gone, and watching her mother nearly work herself to death at the nearby asylum. Mean­while, 12-year old Angie revels in being different and spends her time creating a horrifying deck of tarot cards while channeling Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo and running wild through the woods. The siblings are isolated in every imaginable way, but most especially from each other. They have noth­ing in common and no desire to understand each other’s worries. But bit by bit they come together when a greater threat, a killer, appears on the nearby Appalachian Trail. If all this sounds like a thriller, well yes, it certainly is. But Smothermoss is deeply strange (in the best sense of the word), and the monsters the sisters must face are far more complex than the human kind.

Sheila expends most of her energy throughout the book by holding things together and getting by. She tries to keep her head down at school, takes a crappy summer job to raise much-needed extra funds for the family, and takes care of the family’s rabbits that she struggles to think of only as meat (as they are eaten) when her heart sees them as so much more. She has a scar on her neck, which comes from an altercation with Angie’s abusive (and now absent) father, but the lingering effects of that injury have resulted in an emotional (psy­chological? metaphysical?) rope that drags her further and further down to depths of despair and destruction. No one can see this rope but a mysterious teenage boy at the asylum who offers to help her but has his own perplexing history. (A strange teenage boy at an asylum; you know his story is not going to be anything obvious.)

Angie is a whole other kettle of fish, as she spends her spare time preparing for war against communist invaders (this is the early 1980s) and seeking answers from her tarot deck, which is both prescient and powerful. The murder of two hikers on the nearby Appalachian Trail is a catalyst for all the secrets the girls are hiding from each other, but nothing is obvious in this novel, not even what appears to be a clear-cut crime. As everyone in the area becomes more paranoid after the kill­ings, Alering piles on the tension, and neither girl knows who or what they can trust. Sheila’s attempt to save Angie, who suffers from a com­plete lack of fear, while fighting the compulsion of her rope, ratchets the tension to daunting levels. Will the girls catch the murderer? Maybe. More importantly, what aspect of their family history has confined them so squarely in an existence that seems determined to destroy them, and what does their odd great-aunt know about it? For quite a few chapters, I had no idea where Smothermoss was going (was it a crime novel or was it horror?) and remain awed by Alering’s impressive ability to create something so unique, so evocative, and certainly without contemporary comparison. This an author doing outstanding work; don’t miss this rural literary explosion that resonates long after the final page is turned.

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This review and more like it in the October 2024 issue of Locus.

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