Formats: Print, audio, digital
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Genre: Gothic
Audience: Adult
Diversity: Bisexual main character, main character with alcohol use disorder (AUD)
Takes Place in: Wisconsin
Content Warnings (Highlight to view): Alcohol Abuse, Animal Death, Classism, Death, Drug Use/Abuse, Homophobia, Illness, Mental Illness, Rape/Sexual Assault, Self-Harm, Sexism, Sexual Abuse, Slut-Shaming, Stalking, Suicide, Transphobia, Victim Blaming, Vomit
Blurb
Sam, finally sober and stable with a cat and a long-term boyfriend in Brooklyn, returns alone to Hemlock, her family’s deteriorating cabin deep in the Wisconsin Northwoods, where her mother disappeared years before and never returned. But a quick, practical trip takes a turn for the worse when the rot and creak of the forest starts to creep in around the edges of Sam’s mind. It starts, as it always does, with a beer.
As Sam dips back into the murky waters of dependency, the inexplicable begins to arrive at her door in the forms of a neighbor who leaves no trace, a talking doe who sounds just like Sam’s missing mother, and a series of mysterious gifts that might be a welcome or a warning. And as Sam’s stay extends—as the town’s grip on her tightens and her body takes on a strange new shape—the borders of reality begin to blur, and she senses she is battling something sinister—whether nested in the woods or within herself.
Hemlock is a carnal coming-of-addiction, a dark sparkler about rapture, desire, transformation, and transcendence in many forms. What lives at the heart of fear—animal, monster, or man? How do we contain a threat that may come from within? And how can we reject our own inheritance, the psychic storm that’s been coming for generations, and rebuild a new home for ourselves? In the tradition of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, Hemlock is a novel of singular style, with all the edginess of a survival story and a simmering menace that glints from the very periphery of the page.
Hemlock is not a traditional horror narrative, so be warned if you go in expecting monsters, violent killers, or haunted houses. Instead, it’s a much more subtle approach to gothic fiction about a woman being haunted by her alcoholism. It has all the classic hallmarks of gothic fiction such as beautiful but isolated locales hiding dark secrets, decay, obsession, supernatural elements, and an antihero protagonist tormented by the family curse of alcoholism. Sam has managed to remain sober for ten months, but when she leaves her life in New York City to return to rural Wisconsin and fix up her parent’s cabin in the Northwoods, she quickly falls off the wagon. Sam’s father built the cabin in the Northwoods himself out of pine, and named it Hemlock (after one of his favorite varieties of pine) explaining “if you love something, you’ve got to give it a name.” Sam thinks it’s interesting that the cabin also shares the name of a deadly plant. Later in the book, we learn Hemlock means “you will be my death” in the language of flowers.
Sam had a hard childhood. She was bullied for her dark skin and body hair inherited from her Italian father. People said they “didn’t like the look of her” even though she did everything to try and be good. She was bullied by boys who spit on her. The ladies at church described her as “feral.” Because Sam wasn’t white enough or feminine enough, she was othered by her rural community and labeled as “bad.” Eventually, Sam embraces the labels forced upon her and goes down a self-destructive path that includes abusive relationships, letting men do whatever they want with her, self-sabotage, and alcoholism. Sam does finally get into a healthy relationship with a man named Stephen and manages to stay sober for ten months. But returning to Hemlock triggers her return to alcohol. It starts simply enough. Sam discovers a pack of beer in the basement of the cabin, as if it’s been left there just for her, and tells herself she deserves one after all the hard work she’s done. But one beer is never enough. Getting drunk is the first time Sam has felt truly happy and at peace in a while.
Hemlock’s isolation is both a blessing and a curse for Sam. On the one hand it gives her the peace she’s been craving from living in NYC. Surrounded by nature, she finds a contentment she didn’t have in the city. On the other, too much time alone causes Sam to relapse and her mind starts to play tricks on her. Or perhaps there really is something in the woods, a cryptid or a ghost, the novel leaves it open to interpretation. In a review published of 280 hundred studies it was found “that rural, relative to urban, residence is associated with an increased likelihood of hazardous alcohol use and alcohol-related harm.” Being low income also increases the risk of alcohol related harm. There’s also a lack of treatment options for alcohol and substance use disorder in rural areas compared to urban areas. For Sam, alcoholism is a family trait, passed down from mother to daughter. Her grandmother was an alcoholic but did everything to hide it. Sam’s mother was an alcoholic who drank Listerine after Sam and her father poured out all the booze in the house. Sam lives with the shame of having a mother with alcohol use disorder and resents her mother for it, but still ends up growing up to be an alcoholic herself. It has been found that children of alcoholics are at an increased risk of having alcohol use disorder.
I don’t find Sam particularly likable, but she doesn’t need to be. She feels real. She feels like someone struggling. There’s a reason it’s hard to be in a relationship with or related to alcoholics. As Sam puts it “anyone who’s ever loved a drunk knows that having hope is the most hopeless thing.” Sam doesn’t really like herself when she’s drinking either. She starts fights with strangers and gets arrested. She drives under the influence. She cheats on her boyfriend. In her family, they don’t talk about their feelings, they ignore them and cope by drinking. Sam will feel guilty about what she did while intoxicated, then drink more to deal with the shame, repeating the cycle. She believes the best feeling in the world is the oblivion that comes with being drunk, and nothing, including her boyfriend, can compete with it because alcohol is her one true love.
I liked how it was mainly women who influence Sam’s life (her father and boyfriend were less important) and fit the maiden, mother, crone archetype. There’s her mother, who loved Sam but whose struggles with alcohol forced Sam to grow up too fast. The maiden is a woman Sam meets in a hardware store who Sam cheats on her boyfriend with. She encourages Sam to get drunk and party with her. Then, there’s the good influence among the three, Lou-Ann, an older, butch Ojibwe lesbian and recovering alcoholic who gives Sam good advice and encourages her to go to an AA meeting with her. She reminded me a lot of a recovery coach I work with; a down-to-earth older woman who’s been sober for nearly 40 years and uses her personal experience with alcoholism to help guide others to sobriety and support them on their journey of recovery. Like my coworker, Lou-Ann never shames Sam for her alcoholism, but she doesn’t bullshit her either. She just lets her know she’ll be there when Sam is ready. While I was initially concerned that Lou-Ann would skirt the line of the unfortunate “drunken Indian” stereotype I personally felt like Faliveno did a good job making her feel like a real, complex person. But while no red flags went off for me, I’m also not Native, so her character may hit different for someone who is.
Sam physically transforms over the course of the story. Her muscles become more defined and her body hair thicker and darker. Her eyes change color and her senses sharpen to the point she no longer needs contacts and she can hear sounds in the woods. Some days Sam feels like a woman, some days, she doesn’t. Lately, she’s felt like something that doesn’t have a name. I liked the references to gender dysphoria, but I wish Sam’s transformation had more of a payoff. At first, I thought she was becoming something monstrous, but that particular plotline doesn’t really go anywhere.
Sam also encounters a talking doe, whom I suspect will be divisive. The doe is snarky and offers advice, but the humor and fancifulness of her character in an otherwise dark story can feel out of place. Personally, I liked the doe as a character, but wasn’t entirely sure she fit the gothic aesthetic. Faliveno never reveals whether the doe, Sam’s transformation, or the dark figure in the forest are supernatural or just a figment of Sam’s imagination brought on by alcohol. Normally I’m a big fan of leaving the reader wondering if something is supernatural or not à la the Turn of the Screw, but this didn’t feel well executed. Don’t get me wrong, some of it worked (like the possible ghost), but some of it, like Sam’s changing body, didn’t. You can only get away with so many unanswered questions before the reader starts to get frustrated. The other thing I struggled with was the overall lack of horror. Sure, there are some tense moments, but there’s no big payoff, just a sense of something dangerous in the woods.
Faliveno is an essayist, and the book does sometimes feel more like a series of essays on alcoholism and smalltown life in the rural Northwest than one cohesive narrative. This is not a criticism by any means, though I do feel it will work for some people and not for others. For me, it sort of worked. I was pulled in by the first half of the book, but by the second half, my interest began to wane. While there were a lot of things that didn’t work for me, I truly enjoyed Faliveno’s honest look at what alcoholism does to a person. In an interview, the author explains she had experienced her own struggles with alcohol, which helped inform her writing. Overall, I think I would have enjoyed the book more if I had gone in with different expectations.
