Melissa Faliveno: Hemlock, Gebunden

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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.