“Sheila definitely doesn’t love her sister when Angie takes the last pancake at breakfast, the one that is Sheila’s by any standard of decency since Angie already ate four and Sheila only two. Sheila is eating slow so she can pretend they don’t live like animals … Then Angie grabs the pancake with the fingers she has just licked grape jelly off of, and folds it into her mouth. ‘What? You weren’t going to eat it.’ It’s true; she wasn’t. But that’s not the point at all. That’s what Angie will never understand.” — Alisa Alering, Smothermoss

​In 2024, Literary Hub published an essay titled “Empowering Emptiness” by Alisa Alering, in which she wrote about growing up in the Appalachian mountains of Pennsylvania during the 1980s. Her family did not have much money and for Alisa gothic romances, particularly those by Victoria Holt, were a needed escape. It’s a very fine essay (still online) and when I learned that Alisa Alering would be releasing her debut novel Smothermoss I made a note.

​And so when Smothermoss begins it’s the 1980s. Sheila 17 and Angie 12 live with their mother and their great aunt in the Appalachian mountains. Their mother works at the Iron Mountain State Asylum. Sheila and Angie attend school where they are bullied by their more well to do classmates. At home Sheila tends to the chores while Angie mostly can be found in her bedroom drawing monsters on a set of index cards that she carries around with her. Angie has given them personalities and lays them out on her bed like tarot cards. Angie tries to interest her sister in her monster card collection but Sheila just shakes her head at this weirdness.

​And then a real monster arrives on the mountain. Two female hikers are found dead on the Appalachian trail near Sheila and Angie’s home. The sheriff’s department is looking for the killer but after awhile it looks like he may have fled. But Angie sees the hunt for the killer as the most exciting thing to happen in her town. She decides the killer is a Russian agent and it is her job to catch him. She needs a weapon though which she has spotted in the local hardware store:

​”If she had a knife like this, she could make booby traps and fletch arrows … She could defend herself against the Russians and the zombies. She could protect her mom and the dogs and the rabbits and even Sheila if that murderer comes snooping around in the middle of the night again. With a knife like this she could sit on the bus anywhere she wanted. If she had a knife like this, no one would dare call her a little girl. She turns the knife in her hand. “Fifty dollars, huh?” “Yep.” … She has to have it”

​Smothermoss is, above all a coming of age story about two sisters and how they relate to each other and the world around them. Sheila is the good responsible sister. Angie is the little imp and I loved Angie. Imagine Beverly Cleary’s Ramona age 12 transported to the Appalachian mountains. As to whether the killer is caught and justice served I won’t reveal. But I am very glad I stumbled upon Alisa Alering’s essay two years ago, which led me to her debut novel Smothermoss.

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