Overview

A woman haunted by a dark inheritance returns to the woods where her mother vanished, in this queer Gothic novel-a butch Black Swan. 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.

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9780316588195

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Reviews

""Faliveno has written the gothic midwestern mystery we've all been waiting for--I devoured this eerie, sexy parable of addiction and becoming. A delight from beginning to end.""--Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood and The Dry Season ""Melissa Faliveno's Hemlock is a terrific Midwestern ghost story. A novel that knows a northwoods late at night, an old cabin, and a lonely soul can all be equally as haunted."" --Megan Giddings, author of Lakewood ""Hemlock is a propulsive, atmospheric story of ghosts, monsters, and transformation, with a sharp eye for gender dynamics and the queer experience in rural places. This tension-filled exploration of an inescapable haunting is a nuanced story of addiction and inheritance.""--Booklist (starred review) ""Faliveno brings readers to the edge of their seats and keeps them there...a haunting story about generational legacies, both good and bad.""--LIbrary Journal ""There's much to enjoy in this gothic family drama.""--Publishers Weekly ""Gorgeous and surprising, Hemlock's propulsive plot is fueled by equal parts Midwestern dread and Midwestern love, a combination my own Midwestern heart recognizes as home. Faliveno sets her exploration of the complicated, compelling legacies of family and place amid a great and beautiful landscape I've loved all my life, but that I've maybe never seen as vividly as I do right now, after having been shown it anew through Faliveno's evocative prose. A spectacular debut.""--Matt Bell, author of Appleseed ""Hauntingly visceral and utterly mesmerizing, Hemlock plunges into the shadowed and swirling terrain of dependence and its many faces. Melissa Faliveno weaves addiction as metamorphosis, desire as wilderness, in prose that pulses like a heartbeat. A debut of startling originality that reads like a fever dream and burrows beneath the skin. Hemlock is urgent, unapologetic, and utterly unforgettable.""--Chelsea Bieker, bestselling author of Madwoman and Godshot ""Utterly entrancing, Hemlock captures the insularity and expansiveness of the psyche in isolation, not unlike the teeming abundance of the forest kingdom. Here in the Northwoods, the trees close in sounding more and more like water; animals speak in words; what is human might become earthly--the earthly, supernatural. With stunning and gothic prose, in the vein of Carson McCullers, Melissa Faliveno's debut novel reveals the world anew and, in doing so, summons within readers a revelatory sense of presence, myth, and haunting.""--T Kira Madden, author of Whidbey and Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

""Utterly entrancing, Hemlock captures the insularity and expansiveness of the psyche in isolation, not unlike the teeming abundance of the forest kingdom. Here in the Northwoods, the trees close in sounding more and more like water; animals speak in words; what is human might become earthly--the earthly, supernatural. With stunning and gothic prose, in the vein of Carson McCullers, Melissa Faliveno's debut novel reveals the world anew and, in doing so, summons within readers a revelatory sense of presence, myth, and haunting.""--T Kira Madden, author of Whidbey and Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

""Hauntingly visceral and utterly mesmerizing, Hemlock plunges into the shadowed and swirling terrain of dependence and its many faces. Melissa Faliveno weaves addiction as metamorphosis, desire as wilderness, in prose that pulses like a heartbeat. A debut of startling originality that reads like a fever dream and burrows beneath the skin. Hemlock is urgent, unapologetic, and utterly unforgettable.""--Chelsea Bieker, bestselling author of Madwoman and Godshot ""Utterly entrancing, Hemlock captures the insularity and expansiveness of the psyche in isolation, not unlike the teeming abundance of the forest kingdom. Here in the Northwoods, the trees close in sounding more and more like water; animals speak in words; what is human might become earthly--the earthly, supernatural. With stunning and gothic prose, in the vein of Carson McCullers, Melissa Faliveno's debut novel reveals the world anew and, in doing so, summons within readers a revelatory sense of presence, myth, and haunting.""--T Kira Madden, author of Whidbey and Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

Author Information

Melissa Faliveno is the author of the debut essay collection Tomboyland, named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, New York Public Library, Oprah Magazine, Electric Literature, and Debutiful, and recipient of a 2021 Award for Outstanding Literary Achievement from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her writing has appeared in Esquire, Paris Review, Kenyon Review,Literary Hub, Ms. magazine, Bitch magazine, and Brooklyn Rail, among others, and in the anthologies Sex and the Single Woman and Hit Repeat Until I Hate Music. Born and raised in small-town Wisconsin and a longtime resident of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, she teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina and lives in the woods outside Chapel Hill.

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