Review: Hemlock - Melissa Faliveno

Genre: literary horror, gothic, queer Published: Little Brown and Company, January 2026 My Rating: 5/5 stars, first favourite of 2026

"Because no matter how far you run, she knew—no matter how hard you try to shed your old skin and become something else—the place you come from stays with you. It always calls you back."

The second I finished Hemlock, I realized two things. First, this was going to be a marmite-book that I won’t be able to recommend to just any wide audience. Second, that it is my favourite book of the year thus far, and I won’t hesitate to sing its praised and hopefully help it find the audience that will love it just as much as I did.

Hemlock is a dreamlike deep-dive into the feral nature of trauma. It's a haunting, unsettling and strange tale of transformation, identity, and addiction, firmly in the niche-subgenre of gothic literary-weird novels that I'm apparently a sucker for. Pitched as "Butch Black Swan" (which, I have to say: accurate!), this is for fans of Melissa Broder's Death Valley, Leila Motley's Nightcrawling, Kit Mayquists Tripping Arcadia and reminded me a lot of one of my all-time favourite novellas Green Fuse Burning.

The Story:

Sam, a recovering alcoholic with a haunted past, is in a stable place for the first time in a long time. Her cat, long-term boyfriend and Brooklyn apartment offer the steady ground she needs to not drown her ghosts in spirits. That fragile stability is broken when she returns alone to Hemlock, her family’s deteriorating cabin deep in the Wisconsin Northwoods, where her mother disappeared years before and never returned.

What should’ve been 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 and ends with a series of encounters in the woods that begin to blur the edges of reality…

What I loved:

Within its superficially fevered and disorienting plot, I loved how grounded in its thematic power this novel felt throughout. Faliveno tackles queerness, addiction, generational trauma and repressed grief in a way that feels utterly authentic and personal.

It falls in that specific niche-trope of exploring healing from grief and trauma through the lens of a connection with nature, that I’m a sucker for. Nature, the forest around the titular cabin, and its flora and fauna are brought to life through beautiful prose, and takes on multiple roles to our protagonist. The forest becomes a metaphor, a companion, a separator, tormentor, and eventually a larger-than-life-creature for Sam to surrender to in an almost religious manner.

Again: thematically, there’s so much to unpack within these pages, and I love that the author doesn’t spell it all out for you, but leaves plenty of room for interpretation on the readers part.

I can see why this book currently sits at a fairly low average rating. For starters, our protagonist Sam is a deeply flawed and often unlikable character, which might already put some readers off. Secondly, the book is never “neat” or “perfect” by any stretch of the imagination. Instead it’s at often messy, sometimes unpolished, and at times it attempts to juggle too many different metaphors to create a tie a perfect literary circle. Yet that imperfect messiness is exactly what I loved about the novel, as it so resonates with its themes and story. Hemlock – like its protagonist – finds a way to be comfortable in its own authenticity and unruly wild nature, and there’s something incredibly refreshing and healing about that.

I absolutely adored this book and the introduction to an author who isn’t afraid to colour a little outside the lines. I will keep an eye out for anything they do in the future.

Many thanks to Hachette & Little Brown for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

You can find this book here on Goodreads.