Monday, February 13, 2023

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Lone Women by Victor LaValle

 


Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC Audiobook (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on March 28, 2023 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

Lone Women is the latest novel from author Victor Lavalle, one of the more accclaimed - and deservedly so - writers out there over the last few years. His Lovecraft subversion The Ballad of Black Tom was a brilliant take on one of Lovecraft's more racist stories and his novel The Changeling was just absolutely brilliant in its dark modern fairy tale. That latter novel dealt not only with modern racism, but the refusal of society to listen to women in New York City, and Lone Women promises similar themes...except this time in a Western setting out in 1915 Montana.

And the result is similarly spectacular, even if it doesn't quite reach The Changeling's heights. Lone Women tells the story of women attempting to take advantage of the government's giving away of land to anyone who would grow on the land for a specific (3 years) length of time. More particularly it tells the story of women who are outcasts for various reasons, who don't fit in "normal" white cis hetero society, such as its main protagonist Adelaine Henry, a Black woman haunted by a monster she carries in a steamer trunk, but also a bunch of others. And the story really works as it combines its western setting with horror tropes to tell a story of racism, of hatred of those who are others that don't fit in, of found family, and more. It's another real winner from LaValle.


----------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------
Adelaide Henry spent the first thirty one years of her life on her parents' Lucerne Valley farm in California, the only land in which Black settlers were allowed to make a claim there. Now it is the year 1915 and her parents are dead, victims of the curse that had isolated them and Adelaide from their community, the curse that lives in the Seward steamer trunk in her possession. And so Adelaide sets fire to the house and sets out for freedom, following an idea put into her head by a letter titled "Success of a Lone Woman", whereby a woman moved to Montana and, taking advantage of a government grant of land for anyone willing to work it for three years, had made a free life for herself. Adelaide takes with her only her meager possessions....and the Steamer Trunk.

But after the difficult journey, Adelaide makes it to Montana to find a cold harsh land sparsely settled, with only one other black person nearby. The white community she finds there is oddly supportive...but Adelaide refuses to keep her guard down, knowing what could happen if the Steamer trunk is ever opened by a curious neighbor...and knowing just as well how White people can be. And yet, Adelaide can't help but feel some kindred spirit to some of the more oddball people in town - single mother Grace and her son Sam or fellow Black woman Bertie and her Asian companion Fiona most of all.

Still, when a prospective suiter gets too curious and a con-artist family of outlaws get their eyes on Adelaide, it becomes clear that Adelaide's status quo cannot hold, and the curse cannot be kept locked away. And though that may give Adelaide a sense of freedom for a bit, once people in the area start dying, it will become clear that she must make a choice about how she can confront the monster of her past so that she can possibly have a future.....
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Lone Women is sort of a combination of a Western and a Gothic Horror to a certain extent, and like with such novels, it's tricky to describe the plot summary without spoiling. The novel is largely told from Adelaide's point of view, as its lead protagonist, but it jumps around at times, with certain chapters told from the perspective of other outsider characters and a few told from the perspective of others, most notably one antagonist character who undergoes a bit of character development throughout.

In Adelaide the book finds its exemplar: one of the titular Lone Women who has set out because something about her sets her apart from "normal" society and keeps her on her own, even when she doesn't like to be. For Adelaide that is two things: her skin-color and the monster she carries with her locked away, a monster that she refuses to accept for much of the book. One thing the book makes quite clear is that in the rough atmosphere of Montana, her differences are things that are looked past for quite a while - after all, in this cold dangerous land, everyone needs to stick out for each other. And yet, as things start going wrong, those differences come back to the fore, as Adelaide sort of expected, leaving her in danger. But there are other Lone Women and people the book introduces. So there's Grace, the single mother who is ostracized for how she elects to raise and teach her son (rot13 spoiler: gur fba vf genaf) in ways that don't fit what is accepted in white norm society. There's Bertie and Fiona, the black woman who earned her claim through 3 years of work and now has converted her land to a pub essentially (just prior to prohibition led by the white women in town) and wants to live in peace with her lover, Fiona, the Asian Laundress who is even more discriminated against than the two blacks in town. All of these women have something that sets them apart, from their skin color to their queerness, to how they treat the others they care about, and that prevents them from fitting in with the society that seems "normal around them".

And yet their otherness, once they each learn to accept it, stands in sharp contrast to the others who are supposedly normal in town, who limit themselves and seem in the book to be well just kind of awful. There's the rich couple who runs the town essentially, with the man liking to play cards and drink but figuring himself better than admitting it and better than anyone else, valuing himself above all else and not really caring for anyone who is hurt (and who leads a posse to strangle anyone who could threaten their lifestyle). Then there's his wife, the true leader of the town, who tries to insist to those in town that they are special for braving the cold but really is just a domineering woman who refuses to accept things that aren't normal...even if they're people or things close to her, and is revealed to be traumatized from something from years ago. And then there's a family of a mother and four boys who are con artist theives who try to take advantage of how far apart everyone is, who are utterly selfish and use as an excuse their struggling for taking things from everyone.

This contrast between the Lone Women and between the normal society works really well, as the story uses its horror and western setting to tell a story that is INSANELY suspenseful, such that I had to hold my breath while reading. The themes work really well, and the ending, as Adelaide and the others band together and learn to accept their own bits of strangeness, and the stragneness of those around them, works extremely well. There's one major subplot which I didn't feel worked quite so well - featuring a character who is antagonist who makes a surprising decision to turn things around in the end - which just felt off and way too abrupt to work for me.

But otherwise the suspense, the thrilling plot, and the excellent themes and characters really work damn well here, and I strongly recommend Lone Women, like I have all of LaValle's work.


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