SMOTHERMOSS, a novel by Alisa Alering • Book Reviews

A novel by Alisa Alering, reviewed by Alana Craib
SMOTHERMOSS (Tin House)

The Appalachian Mountains may be the oldest mountain ranges in the world. Dating all the way back to Pangea, they have grown and ached and evolved and mutated with the passing of time. In long-lived folklore, oral storytelling, ghost stories and dream worlds—amongst countless Appalachian communities—the mountain range is known for its mysterious and powerful aura, for unexplained and peculiar happenings. The ancient land behaves as if it has a heart and mind of its own; Smothermoss, by Alisa Alering, tells us with certainty that it does.

Appalachia expands across the eastern coast of the United States, from all the way down in mid-Mississippi up to south-western New York state. I grew up in upstate New York—or the ‘Rust Belt’– a cultural regional name for the northeastern and midwestern regions of the U.S., fondly named to describe rural and urban areas that have rusted out and deindustrialized leaving behind a belt of old towns and cities nestled in between long and vast stretches of agricultural farmland. Flanked by the very northern tip of Appalachia, the western edge of the Catskills, and the southern border of the Adirondack mountains, the very hills behind my childhood home seemed to breathe—groaning with something much older and far more godly than anything I could understand. Reading Smothermoss, I felt language being applied to something I once believed was unsay-able, indescribable; something that transcended language. Alering grew the mountains out of the pages themselves, and all the mountain-creatures with them.

Smothermoss follows the world of two very different sisters, Angie and Sheila, in the 1980s, living on the mountains of Appalachia. Both sisters are afflicted with their own peculiar hauntings, and the conditions only become stranger as their small and isolated community quakes with the murder of two female hikers. Through the eyes of the sisters, the mountain speaks in riddles, sends signs in the form of possessed playing cards and boys no one else can see, rabbits that don’t always mean well and an older woman with stories that seem to predate the mountains themselves. The chapters oscillate between the sisters’ points of view with each of the girls knowing something the other does not. Sometimes our narrators keep secrets, even from the reader.

The novel centers on the two sisters orbiting each other around the mountain, hung in the constant tension of their strained relationship and the desolate conditions of the life they are facing and its mysterious powers. This tension is tugged on and tested by the strange and uncanny events unraveling in the woods, and we hang in limbo with the sisters, trying desperately to make out shadows in the trees. We are intrigued by the powers that be and the peculiar and twisted murder, yes, but the heart of the mountain is manifested in the hearts of Sheila and Angie. We watch the girls’ actions and desires closely, and with curiosity. The very landscape of Appalachia moves and breathes with them.

While this eerie, murder-mystery-ghost-story unthreads itself with intrigue, it is clear that Smothermoss draws its power and its magic from the language and the indelible descriptions. It is in the physical, visual, sensory language and imagination of the land in which Alering’s writing begins to simply fly. Her storytelling strength appears most embodied in the moments of silence– in which we as readers are on the precipice of seeing something moving in the woods, of overhearing something that sends chills down our spines, of watching the sisters float in between two different modes of reality. Similarly, the book itself floats in between different modes of genre– at times fabulist, fantastical, dreamlike, fictitious and realistic; at other times ghostly, horrific, mysterious and stark. Smothermoss is not easily definable and does not give you easy answers. It will not do the reader any good to ask “but what is the truth?” or “but what is actually happening?” when reading this book, because you will not be satisfied, and will most likely be better off not knowing. Besides– mountains rarely, if ever, give up their secrets so easily.

Smothermoss took me by the hand and the heart and led me deep into the wilderness and asked me to be afraid. To be afraid of the mountains is to respect their longevity and their wisdom. Angie and Sheila ask us to be afraid and to feel it anyways. In the wake of finishing Smothermoss, your first task is to sit outside and breathe in the air– to let it fill your nose and your lungs, to feel comfort in knowing that this remarkable, overwhelming, powerful world and all its trees can finally find a speakable and knowable language in Alisa Alering’s words.

Alana Craib is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College with a BA in Creative Writing and Literary History in May, and studies fiction in Brown University’s Literary Arts MFA program. She has worked as an editor for Love and Squalor Literary Magazine, co-chair for The Garden Variety Multidisciplinary Zine, and staff writer for The Phoenix student newspaper. She was a summer 2024 intern for Cleaver.