Hemlock

The last book I read by Melissa Faliveno was her collection of personal essays called Tomboyland. I loved that book. It holds new weight four years later when the assault on queerness continues at a national scale. I imagine for many queer youth, life in towns like Mt. Horeb (and indeed even cities like Madison or Milwaukee) today remains challenging and fraught with assumptions and prejudices from people who can’t be bothered to understand. Her latest book, Hemlock, is a gothic novel set in Northern Wisconsin. Maybe we’re calling this Boreal Gothic? Sam grew up going to the northwoods as a child, but eventually life took her to New York City and eventually included her partner, Stephen, and cat, Monster. Something calls her back to her family’s cabin in Wisconsin, Hemlock, built by her father and neglected after her mother died three years after her mother mysteriously vanished into the woods. Faliveno foreshadows early in the novel that a darkness lurks in Hemlock. The darkness that…