Smothermoss

May 13, 2024
Alering mixes mountain magic and teenage angst in her potent if murky debut set in 1980s Appalachia. Sisters Sheila, 17, and Angie, 12, live on a mountain with their mother and their great-aunt Thena, who took the family in after a hazily described traumatic event involving their father. Sheila, who has a rope tied around her neck that only she can see, works as a dishwasher at a state asylum for the criminally insane when she is not at school, while Angie spends her free time drawing tarot-like cards whose characters talk to her, including one she names the Worm King. After two women are found bludgeoned to death on a hiking trail near Thena’s house, the girls put their minds and their magic toward finding the killer. Many strange things happen—a boy who inexplicably lives at the asylum tells Sheila he can see her rope, drawings of Angie’s characters appear in a patient’s cell, and the sisters eventually turn up useful clues thanks to input from the Worm King. Some readers will be left scratching their heads, but Alering pulls off an evocative portrait of the creepy rural setting. It’s a passable Appalachian gothic. Agents: Martha Perotto-Wills and James Mustelier, Bent Agency.

June 15, 2024
A murder on the Appalachian Trail draws two sisters deeper into the mystery of their mountain home. Sheila and Angie are growing up in a ramshackle house at the top of a "long, rutted lane," where their extreme poverty singles them out even in the generally impoverished environs of 1980s Appalachia. Along with their mother, Bonnie, and an elderly relative, Thena, the girls scrape by, making due with meat from the rabbits they raise in the yard, vegetables from their garden, and the wild bounty of the mountain to whose side they cling. As if the realities of their lives weren't difficult enough, both girls are also afflicted with elements of mountain magic that make them seem even stranger. Twelve-year-old Angie--a fierce girl whose daydreams all feature guerrilla warfare against invading Dolph Lundgren-lookalike Russians--always carries a pack of index cards on which she's drawn arcane characters like the Dustman, The Twins With Too Many Teeth, and Tangle of Rabbits. She uses the cards for divination and protection, but sometimes the cards seem to use her, choosing for themselves where they will be dealt. Seventeen-year-old Sheila, who's far more traumatized by their isolation, holds herself apart from the rest of the family, intent on guarding her twin secrets: her love for her classmate Juanita and the invisible rope that has been thickening around her neck since childhood. When two women hiking the Appalachian Trail are beaten to death in their tent only two ridges from the girls' home, the whole mountain community--and indeed the mountain itself--is galvanized by the rabid brutality. Each in her own way, Sheila and Angie set out to resolve the wrongness that has entered their world in the murderer's wake. A dense, atmospheric novel whose setting operates as fully as any of its characters, Alering's debut is one part fairy tale, one part thriller, and one part ethnography of an area that endures in our mythopoetic memories even as it vanishes from the face of the land. A compelling debut that glimmers with the lights of the forest as it unwinds its tale.

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