HEMLOCK

A New Yorker heads to the Northwoods of Wisconsin to renovate her parents’ cabin after her mother’s mysterious disappearance.

Sam, who’s 38, grew up in Wisconsin and often spent time with her parents at Hemlock, a cabin in the Northwoods that her father had built himself with an eye toward retiring there. But those plans were derailed first by the mental decline of Sam’s alcoholic mother and then, more recently, by her disappearance, when she took off into the woods and never returned. To spare her father, Sam offers to make repairs and ready the cabin for sale. Leaving her male partner behind in Brooklyn—Sam is androgynous and has dated both men and women—she arrives in Wisconsin to the same sense of not fitting in that she’s carried since her tomboy childhood there. This time, the sense of otherness is amplified by some strange experiences: First, a doe Sam feeds begins speaking to her. Then, though she’s been sober for nearly a year, Sam begins drinking again and finds herself routinely waking up in the woods in the mornings with no memory of how she got there. And then there’s her body, undergoing some…unusual transformations. Now that she’s returned home, is Sam becoming someone—or something—new? Or merely what she’s been deep down all along? Faliveno plays with some fun gothic tropes—the isolated setting, a mind fraying—and it’s especially satisfying to see these transposed onto the Upper Midwest, which is captured here in both its beauty and ugliness. The novel doesn’t have the taut pacing one might expect of a story that should be suffused with dread and suspense, though, and the connections between its themes—grief, addiction, class, sexuality—and its eerie plot elements never quite become clear.

A debut novel that can’t quite tame its wild and promising elements.