October 1, 2022
In 1915, having inadvertently killed her parents, Adelaide dashes frantically from Redondo, CA, to Montana, where she plans to homestead on land given out by the government. With her is a trunk she keeps securely locked because when it's opened, people start to disappear. But can she really keep her secrets all locked up? From Shirley Jackson and Ernest Gaines Award winner LaValle.
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
January 2, 2023
World Fantasy Award winner LaValle (The Changeling) returns with a haunting historical horror novel. In 1915, Adelaide Henry flees her California hometown following the death of her parents, for which she feels responsible. Inspired by a testimonial from a single woman who took advantage of a loophole in a homesteading opportunity offered by the federal government, Adelaide makes the trek to Montana with a mysterious steamer trunk in tow. The trunk contains her deepest, darkest secrets, and as her journey unfolds, readers will get a sense of creeping wrongness about the object, which, Adelaide is adamant, must remain locked at all times. When she arrives in Montanna, Adelaide is unprepared for the harsh winter and the unfamiliar ways of her neighbors: “A woman on her own, a Black woman out here in Montana, far from the Black community she’d known in Lucerne Valley, must remain vigilant for her own sense of safety. In truth, she’d never been around so many white people.” As she adjusts to her new life, she finds that escaping her past is not as easy as she hoped, and that her secrets, once out, could spell death for everyone around her. A counter to the typical homesteading narrative, this moody and masterful western fires on all cylinders. Readers are sure to be impressed. Agent: Gloria Loomis, Watkins/Loomis Agency.
February 1, 2023
Shirley Jackson Award winner LaValle (The Changeling) beautifully captures the vastness of the 1915 Montana frontier and the subtlety of terror in his latest. Adelaide Henry has a dark secret: a terrible curse gifted to her family the day she was born. Destined to live in shame or die from it, Adelaide flees her family farm in California to be a homesteader. Desperate to start over, she buys property in Montana, sight unseen, and brings with her only a steamer trunk that holds the secret she can't keep for long, though as a tall Black woman, she finds it difficult to blend in. The history of Adelaide is as murky as her future is unpredictable, but the only way to move forward is to face her demons and tell her truth. A chilling tale of isolation, shame, regret, and survival, LaValle's novel is incredibly immersive--readers will hear the wind of the prairie, smell the wood smoke, see the bloodstains, and feel the fear. VERDICT LaValle grips readers with the subtle terror of inevitability, only to hold tight with tenderness.--Alana Quarles
Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from January 15, 2023
A woman heads to Big Sky Country with some unusual baggage--actual, metaphorical, and psychological. As LaValle's beguiling, genre-blending fifth novel opens, it's 1915, and something so awful has happened to Adelaide Henry's parents that she's set the family's California farmhouse ablaze with their corpses inside. With little but rumor to go on, she high-tails it to Montana, believing the state will be welcoming toward a young Black woman with farming skills and an urge to erase an ugly past. Early on, she seems proven right--the residents of Big Sandy are friendly, supportive, and not too inquisitive about what's inside her unusually heavy steamer trunk. But in time the region's secretive nature comes into view, starting with a woman with four blind children who prove to be at the center of a host of deceits. And once the contents of that steamer trunk are unleashed, Adelaide is further pushed into self-preservation mode than she already was as the sole Black woman in a very White and very cold place. LaValle is prodigiously talented at playing with stylistic modes, and here he deftly combines Western, suspense, supernatural, and horror--his prose is unfussy and plainspoken, which makes it easier to seamlessly skate across genres. But LaValle's fluidity when it comes to style is balanced by a focused thematic vision: Through Adelaide (and that steamer trunk), he explores isolation and division across race, within families, and through communities. Her struggle to find her place is complicated by everyone being tight-lipped and eager to create pariahs. ("The silence is the worst part of this suffering," as Adelaide puts it.) The closing chapters get somewhat knotted as LaValle labors to corral a Pandora's box full of plot points. But the novel overall is a winning blend of brains and (occasionally violent) thrills. Acrobatic storytelling, both out there and down-home.
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Starred review from February 1, 2023
In 1915, Montana allows unmarried, Black women the opportunity to claim a homestead, so, having lived her entire life in a California farming community with her parents, Adelaide Henry, 31, sets off. But before she leaves, Adelaide places her murdered parents in bed and burns the house down. Taking only an overnight bag and a heavy, securely locked trunk containing her family's curse, one that she is now solely responsible for controlling, Adelaide will attempt to flee her past while still shackled to it, thus setting LaValle's latest, a pervasively uneasy and brilliantly plotted horror-western hybrid, in absorbing motion. Readers are led to Big Sandy to meet its marginalized and outcast citizens, feel the wide open, unforgiving landscape, and watch the captivating drama, both real and supernatural, unfold. Told with a pulp sensibility, this masterfully paced tale, with short chapters, heart-pounding suspense, a monster that is both utterly terrifying and heartbreakingly beautiful, and a story line focused on the power of women, bursts off the page. Great for fans of thought-provoking horror that probes the inherent terror of marginalization without sacrificing the visceral action, as written by Stephen Graham Jones, Alma Katsu, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia.
COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.