An Appalachian Gothic Fairytale: Alisa Alering’s “Smothermoss” https://ift.tt/akPO5vh
“Out there is only the mountain, as familiar as the planks Angie scrambles across, the battered table with its mismatched chairs… As familiar as the fingermarks on the walls, smooth and shiny from generations of hands touching the same places, year after year.”
In Alisa Alering’s debut novel, Smothermoss, two half-sisters growing up in 1980s Appalachia reckon with otherworldly forces when a brutal murder takes place near their secluded home. The violent act awakens an omniscient presence in the mysterious mountain, a preternatural force pulling the marionette strings from a veiled realm beyond. With acts seen and unseen, this other realm exists alongside the earthen plane that Sheila and Angie have known all their lives. “…the mountain shifts and reshapes. Blocks paths with deadfall, carves new channels, clears fresh routes. Tugs a rope here, drops an irresistible lure there, reels in that wayward shard of chaos with the blood spot eye. Sends them all surging to a single point.”
The sisters live with their mother, who spends most of her time working at the local asylum, and Thena, their great-aunt who is so old, “…Angie wonders if she is already dead.” At seventeen, older sister Sheila lives with the confining weight of a thick rope around her neck, unseen by most yet real enough to affect Sheila physically, causing her to stumble or fall to her knees when it catches or snags on something. “It started as a single thread that she hardly seemed to feel at all. But another thread soon appeared, winding around the first. Then another, and another, twisting together … Now in her senior year of high school, all those fine accumulating fibers have braided themselves into a rope strong enough to hang a man. Or a woman.” In Gothic fairytale fashion, the rope is both a metaphor and a tangible detail within the story’s world, hovering in the space between real and imagined.
In the summer, while working in the asylum’s kitchen, Shelia encounters a strange boy with a blood spot eye. He sees her in a way she has never been seen, challenging her to live beyond the narrow restraints she has confined herself to. As their meetings continue, she reveals parts of her internal world she has learned to keep hidden, like the fact that she has no interest in boys and dreams of being with a girl in her grade named Juanita. As she reveals more of herself, Sheila feels curious and unsettled, torn between her natural tendency to wither inward and the call to expand beyond what she has known – what this strange boy has opened in her, slithering through her defenses.
Opposite Sheila in every way, twelve-year-old Angie runs wild and free, unrestricted, and living in a world of her own making. Concocted tales of Russian soldiers infiltrating the President’s hidden bunker supersede any sense of real-world danger as she searches the forest, consulting her hand-drawn tarot cards for guidance in capturing the violent killer on the run. These cards take on a life of their own, acting as a conduit for the unexplained forces of the mountain. In an interview with Grimoire Magazine, Alering discusses the role of imagery in Smothermoss. In response to the question of what image they would create to best capture the feeling of the book, Alering describes one of Angie’s tarot card designs: “On the card, the Tangle of Rabbits are knotted together. Rabbits stand on rabbits, half-devoured by other rabbits. Rabbit legs thrusting in all directions — a foot into a face into a stomach into a tail. The rabbit made of rabbits crouches in the briars, hiding from its enemies, quivering and trying to survive without being seen. The briars weave around it, snaring its hind legs and tangling around its neck. Thorns tear its tender ears.” Alering further explains, “I didn’t come up with that image until I’d been through a couple of drafts — it was an attempt to sum up the characters’ situation visually. Some of the other cards are more sinister or more powerful, but that one holds the whole story.”
In the same interview, they address the supernatural elements and the role of magic in their writing: “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.”
An astounding debut, Smothermoss’s propulsive plotting, calculated pacing, and gothic tone perfectly tune to a matching frequency thrumming with elemental magic and uncertain allegiances. The descriptive imagery of the natural world calls to mind a more sinister version of Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting, while the peculiar, mystical events draw comparisons to an earthbound Alice in Wonderland. In this gothic fairytale thriller, the mysterious lore of Appalachia occupies the space of questions left unanswered and surreal events left unexplained. The mountain is a place known only by the people who have lived there, a place whose aliveness exists in the vastness between the known and unknown, the seen and unseen. Smothermoss emanates an Appalachian siren song, offering a trade: resist the unknown and remain confined to a singular reality or surrender to the call of the mountainside and willfully tumble down the rabbit hole.
FICTION Smothermoss
By Alisa Alering
Tin House Books
Published July 16, 2024
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