With their debut novel, Alisa Alering does something both grand and understated--they splice genres, like a gardener with pruning shears who creates a new hybrid orchid. Smothermoss is self-assured, it is bodacious, and it is beautiful.
The novel contains aspects of a thriller: two women are found murdered on the side of the mountain, and the killer is still out there. It also contains elements of an LGBTQ+ coming-of-age story: Sheila struggles to come into her own as she is treated like an outcast by her community, dealing with poverty and her sexual identity, while her strange younger sister, Angie, stalks the mountain, ready to pounce on the impending Russian invasion (this is the 1980s United States, after all). The novel is also tied up in the gothic tradition of Shirley Jackson; Sheila feels the weight of a rope around her neck and meets a mysterious boy with a blood speck in his eye who sees way more than he lets on. Instead of castles, there are the spires of Appalachian oaks; instead of the walls talking, the mountain does. "The rabbit women's blood runs along the mountain's skin." The mountain feels, it gesticulates, it undulates under the feet and the will of the people who live on top of it. Nothing goes unnoticed here, and this is superbly reflected in Alering's writing. Every feeling, every nuance, every tic of a cheek and every gesture is noted. Alering is a poet in prose, an alchemist with a pen, and Smothermoss delights and terrifies. --Dominic Charles Howarth, book manager, Book + Bottle