Hemlock
A Novel
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jan 20, 2026
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Town & Country's Must Read Books of Winter 2026 | Most Anticipated in Autostraddle, Literary Hub, and Debutiful | Book Riot's Best Queer Books of January 2026
A woman haunted by a dark inheritance returns to the woods where her mother vanished, in this queer Gothic novel.
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. 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 and her body takes on a strange new shape. As the borders of reality begin to blur, 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 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 butch Black Swan and 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this moody debut novel from essayist Faliveno (Tomboyland), a disillusioned woman returns from New York City to rural Wisconsin. Exhausted by the hustle, Sam leaves behind her boyfriend, her Brooklyn apartment, and her job as a magazine editor for Hemlock, her family's dilapidated cabin, to fix it up so her father can sell it. While there alone, Sam reflects on her family's history of alcoholism and her mother's disappearance into the nearby woods during a mental breakdown a few years earlier. Sam herself struggles with alcohol and succumbs to the temptation after almost a year without drinking. She then starts to sense a malevolent presence in the cabin, has conversations with a doe, and wakes up in the woods on a few occasions after blackouts. She also stops trying to appear feminine, embraces her androgynous nature, and flirts with a local girl named Gina. Faliveno keeps the reader guessing as to whether supernatural forces or Sam's drinking are responsible for the sinister goings-on, and she delivers an ending that's both satisfying and open to interpretation. There's much to enjoy in this gothic family drama.
