Smothermoss by Alisa Alering

Set in an isolated 1980s Appalachian community, reeling from the brutal murder of two hikers, this novel is deliciously creepy and unsettling, yet gorgeous and dreamlike in its portrayal of two impoverished girls who must come to terms with what’s happening on the sentient mountain they call home and also with themselves as they stand on the cusp of adulthood.

1980s Appalachia. Sheila knows she needs to keep her appetites in check.

Isolated and struggling in ramshackle poverty, her desires – for food, for escape, for the perfect girls in the pages of her pilfered magazines – are about the only things she can control. But with every passing day, life with her exhausted mother and her half-feral younger sister Angie feels more like a rope tightening around her neck. When a pair of hikers are brutally murdered on the trail, Sheila and Angie find themselves drawn inexorably into the hunt for the killer.