Reviewed by I.S. Nugent
Smothermoss
by Alisa Alering
Tin House Books
July 2024, ISBN: 9781959030584, $17.95usd, 256 pages
To talk about this book, we must start with the mountain. Close your eyes.
You are a thousand feet tall and thousands of miles wide. Many things crack and spurt and shoot across your back, all monster magic words: bloodroot, spotted skunk cabbage, blackberry cane, poison ivy. You feel the hushed step of deer, the turkeys raking through the mud. You see the man, moving through the brush like a “diseased fox,” stalk and kill two women in the woods. You are the only witness to their deaths, and the violence of this act sinks into you like a splinter. Things split and break loose. Things that live deep within you slip out. This is where the book begins: a murder, a trembling, a magic shaking out of the mountain and upending the lives of our main characters, sisters Sheila and Angie.
Alisa Alering’s debut novel Smothermoss absorbed me like a fog. Alering grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of Pennsylvania where this book is set. From the opening pages, I felt completely immersed in the world of the mountain—its rhythms, sounds, and inexplicable mysteries. Alering’s descriptions of nature are lush and deliciously witchy; the chapters written in a close third to the mountain feel like pages from a spell book.
It is sometime in the 1980’s. The sisters live in a small house on the mountain with their mother Bonnie and great-aunt Thena, only twenty miles from the site of the murder. The girls raise and eat rabbits, pick mushrooms while thinking of mushroom clouds. Sheila, 17, and Angie, 12, have already experienced more trials than some people experience in a lifetime. Their single mother works grueling hours at the nearby state asylum. Their brother was sentenced to a penitentiary upstate for pulling a knife at a bartender. Sheila’s father died in a motorcycle accident; we know nothing of Angie’s father except that they had to sneak out in the middle of the night to escape him. The kids at school mock and bully them, for being poor, for smelling bad, and in Angie’s case, for being too masculine.
I should also mention that Sheila and Angie carry magical objects. Angie, a self-willed girl with preternatural abilities, carries a tarot deck she created herself out of index cards and felt-tip markers. Her deck is filled with monsters, creatures with too many eyes and too many heads and fangs that drip blood. Each chapter of Smothermoss is named after one of her cards—fairytale names like “Tangle of Rabbits” and “Man of Stone” —and Angie’s tarot deck quickly becomes more horrifying than the actual murderer. One card in particular, “The Worm King,” may frighten me away from tarot readings for years to come.
Sheila, too, has a magical object. Hers is a long, invisible rope that loops around her throat like a necklace. Sheila knows very little about her rope, except for the fact that she must not cut it. Instead, she watches it grow new strands, getting thicker and heavier every day.
This bit of magic can feel heavy-handed. Does Sheila need a literal rope around her neck, when it’s so clear that she’s suffocating—suffocating from poverty, disordered eating, and repressed queer desire? Still, by the end of the book, I was on board for the invisible rope. Like the tarot cards, the rope worked as a physical manifestation of how the girls were jerked around by fate. Unlike the rest of us, at least Sheila sees what yanks her.
The book moves between the sisters’ perspectives, sensitively exploring their coping mechanisms, fears, and fantasies. Angie is a natural hero, a reimagined Rambo with a dish towel wrapped around her forehead. As soon as she learns of the murder, she commits herself to catching the killer. She sets off into the mountain to hunt for clues, despite warnings from family and friends.
Meanwhile, Sheila spends her summer washing dishes at the same asylum that employs her mother. Despite the crushing nature of her work, Sheila is buoyed by the fantasy of making enough money to leave Appalachia and move to the big city with her classmate crush Juanita. She tries to ignore the reverberations the murder has caused in her life and in her community, but she cannot escape its gravitational pull. Tarot cards materialize from thin air, money goes missing, and Sheila meets a boy with a blood-red dot in his eye—the only other person who can see her invisible rope.
The book gets wilder and weirder from here, hurtling towards an explosive climax. I caution readers who might come to this book hoping for a murder mystery. There is murder, but there are no puzzles and clues. To enjoy this book, you must be comfortable with questions without answers.
In an interview with Grimoire Magazine, Alering explains:
I like magic that doesn’t make sense. I think not fully understanding how it works is what makes something magic and not science…The magic in Smothermoss is trying to say something about the natural world and the feelings I have for the mountain territory where I grew up that I can’t say in any more direct way because what I’m trying to express doesn’t make sense in the light of day, in the light of logic and what’s “real.” But it might make a whole lot of sense if you just give yourself over to it. If you were to lie down on a big slab of Pre-Cambrian gneiss that’s more than 500 million years old and feel the earth hum through your bones.
There are two things I like about this passage. First, there is a temptation, I think, in novels like this to over explain, to logic out the illogical. The magic and horror of Smothermoss is so effective precisely because it’s obfuscated; the traumas shrouded and the consequences of the sisters’ actions unpredictable. We are put in the same position as Sheila as she stands at the precipice of adulthood. Afraid, confused, and blinking out into the darkness. We can’t see the foxes in the forest, but we can feel their breath.
Second, I like how Alering tells us exactly how to read their book. Here’s my interpretation: Find a comfortable place in the middle of nature, someplace where it’s easy to pretend that you’re bigger than you are. Remind yourself that you know nothing, that books and people can be more than one thing. Lie down with your back to the earth and let Alering’s prose wash over you.
About the reviewer: I.S. Nugent is a mixed-Filipina writer and book critic who lives in Philadelphia. Her work has been published in Bridge Eight Press and Your Impossible Voice. Her short story “Ginger” received an honorable mention for the Anne Kirschbaum Winkelman Literary Prize.