Victor LaValle

The opening of 'Lone Women' captured my imagination. It was visually and emotionally powerful, taking me inside Adelaide Henry's head and making it my home while still being aware that I didn't know her at all, except that I knew she was going to be strong and full of surprises and the that some of them would not be nice surprises. From the beginning, the was a constant sense of foreboding, like a stink rising from the heavy, locked steamer trunk that Adelaide is the only thing Adelaide was show more hauling with her from the ashes of her old life to her new one.

For the first half of the book, I slipped into a satisfying piece of historical fiction with some supernatural elements to it.

The people were vividly drawn and very believable. The important characters were mostly strong women carving a place for themselves. What made them strong and the type of place they were trying to carve varied enormously, leaving room for conflict and collaboration between the women and getting me invested in their struggles.

I liked the way Montana itself became a character in the story. The way the wind beat relentlessly on the women trying to cross its vast, flat, empty spaces. At first, Adelaide thinks that the landscape is trying to kill all the settlers. Then she comes to recognise that the landscape is not inimical to them but completely indifferent to them. Not hostile, simply not a place where people should not choose to live. It took me a while to realise that this said a lot about the range of choices the Lone Women settling there saw themselves as having.

The historical context was established by showing the challenges the women in the story faced on a day-to-day basis rather than through an infodump or a covert history lecture. I can't remember having read any other novel set in Montana at the start of the last century. It was all new to me and yet I felt that I was standing somewhere solid and real.

Violence, the threat of violence and the consequences of violence are the threads used to sow together the people, the place and the plot into a coherent pattern. Some of the violence and threat comes from Adelaides' mysterious trunk. Some of it comes from predators she encounters along the way or who come hunting her and the people around her. Some of it is simply a taken-for-granted attribute of the time and place that Adelaide is living in. All of it is well done.

In this story, violence does more than keep the story moving and maintaining tension. Showing violence as ubiquitous, inevitable, and inescapable changes the characters' and the reader's reaction to it. When violence is not an aberration but an attribute, not a bug but a feature, everyone has to think through what use they will put violence to, who they are willing to protect and how they will do it.

The reality of violence makes everything more personal. There are no arms-length, delivered-by-faceless-institutions options for providing help or punishment. Whatever gets done, gets done by someone you know to someone you know.

It seemed to me that the ever-present potential for personally delivered violence partially explained why the women in the story seemed to have developed an ability to see situations and consequences more clearly than the men around them. The women have more hazards to protect themselves from and less power to do it with.

One way for the women to protect themselves is to stop being Lone Women and become part of a collective. At first, it seemed that Victor LaValle was using the Busy Bees, led by the wealthiest woman in town and promoting a version of sisterhood, female empowerment and mutual support, as an example of this. Then I understood that sisterhood was just a busker's pitch to get the marks inside the Carney tent. What the Busy Bees really exemplify is the weaponisation of exclusion as a mechanism for sustaining and extending power and privilege through patronage. The concept of community is co-opted and refocussed not on mutual support but on defining who is 'us' and who shouldn't be here at all.

For the most part, I enjoyed 'Lone Women' as a tense piece of historical fiction with some weirdness added to give it spice.

In the end though, it was the weirdness that I found hardest to deal with in this book. I really, really wanted to know what was in the steamer trunk. When I found out, I was surprised and intrigued. The answer was novel and scary but no more difficult to accept than many ideas that I swallow whole when I'm reading Urban Fantasy.

The thing is, this isn't Urban Fantasy. I don't think it's horror either. I think this is fiction with an intent. The time and the place seem to have been chosen to make it easier to realise that intent. It seems to me that, the bones that the plot and character are stretched across before violence stitches them tightly in place, are not genre tropes but a set of messages or lessons.

Towards the end of the book, this bone structure seemed to break through the skin of the story, distracting me from what was going on and making me question whether I was supposed to see something real or just a symbol of something else or something real that was also a symbol of something else.

The people, events and setting of the book became so heavily burdened with symbolism or with an additional significance that I sometimes feel that a Chyron running across the bottom of the scenes I was visualising, distracting me from the tension of the plot by running captions like:

Do you see how defining people as different is the first step towards exclusion and the consolidation of power with the few?

Have you understood that society wants these women to be Lone Women, even while it excludes and punishes them for being so?

Freedom lies in the Lone Women coming together in an acceptance that there is strength in difference and diversity?

I stayed immersed in the book to the end. It was a stimulating read, full of powerful images. When it was over, I felt like I watched a really good movie but wished that they'd toned down the score a little. show less

A book with a grabbing premise and setting from the get-go. Juxtaposing the inhumanity of the Outer Gods with that of systematic oppression is a great move, and it does a solid job of setting up a kind of dialectic relationship between the state/status quo embodied by Detective Malone and rebellion against it enacted by Tom.

Some aspects of the overall narrative do feel a little weird though, specifically in terms of how the novel recycles racist rhetoric: racists think Tom is a monster, and show more then he actually becomes one; racists think immigrants are conspiring with one another, and then they actually are. That first thread is deconstructed a little towards the end, but I think both deserved a more thorough dissection--the story could have gone deeper into how mainstream culture constructs these narratives or alternative narratives that arise within marginalized communities or something, rather than allowing them to go largely unremarked upon. As it stands, it feels like the novella struggles to decide between engaging with the anxieties--racial or otherwise--depicted in Lovecraft's original work, and dismissing them to focus on the more sympathetic worries of marginalized people themselves, and I think the story suffers from it.

I was also really confused by one specific passage on historic immigration to the United States. This quote introduces Detective Malone's role in anti-immigrant policing: "The legal immigrants of Europe--German and English, Scottish and Italian, Jewish, French, Irish, and Scandinavian--all were welcomed through the immigration center on Ellis Island. A number of Chinese were permitted through this channel as well. But what about the rest? Malone's beat in Brooklyn brought him through neighborhoods thick with Syrians and Persians, Africans, too. How did they arrive in Brooklyn in such hordes?" I'm not an expert on immigration history, but there are a few things I find weird about this passage.

First of all, the novel takes place in the same year that the Immigration Act of 1924 was passed, which redefined America's immigration system for the next forty years--namely by making it massively more restrictive, especially to Asian Americans. If the novel is interested in immigration, why doesn't it make any reference to this incredibly important piece of legislation?

Secondly, at this time, not all immigrants from Europe were as welcome in the United States as the quote suggests. Restricting the number of Central and South European immigrants to the US, which included Italians and many Jews, was an explicit goal of both the 1924 law and the Emergency Quota Act three years previous.

Thirdly, it's strange to single out the Chinese as a permitted ethnicity when they were at this point the most restricted and policed group of immigrants in the entire United States. From 1882 until 1943, Chinese laborers were completely barred from legal immigration to the United States (with the exception of members of specific skilled professions). From 1892, Chinese residents were required to carry resident permits demonstrating their right to be in the United States or face deportation, the only group of immigrants facing this requirement. So they were pretty far from any kind of acceptance in 1924. Also, I can't imagine many Chinese were entering the United States through Ellis Island--most traveled through Angel Island on the West Coast.

Finally, I'm pretty sure that at this point in history, regulation of immigration was generally enforced at the ports themselves, rather than by dedicated domestic police forces. With the exception of the Chinese, most immigrants didn't even need documentation to show their immigration was legal, and were not subject to deportation unless they faced additional legal issues. And I don't know why even a racist cop would be puzzled by the presence of certain ethnic groups in New York in 1924, when almost completely open immigration was the norm in the United States up until three years prior.

It's just a short passage, but I was so surprised by the amount of ahistorical claims it made that I had to stop reading and go refresh my understanding of America's immigration history before continuing. Maybe it's not a huge problem in the grand scheme of things, but I do think that if the aim of your novel is to bring life to a group of marginalized and maligned people, you have a duty to be true to the lives they actually lived, rather than making the easy pull from modern rhetoric surrounding immigration. I hope my summary clears up some of the misconceptions present in the text and demonstrates how modern the United States (anti-)immigration legal infrastructure and ideology is within the scope of the country's history. show less

Victor LaValle's Lone Women is nothing less than brilliant, a historical/horror novel that delivers readers a succession of surprises. Real surprises.

As Lone Women opens, the novel's central character, Adelaide Henry, is leaving behind the small black farming community in which she was raised, taking with her only a a carefully padlocked, exceptionally heavy trunk. That trunk contains her family's burden: a demon. (The blurbs for the novel include this information, so it doesn't count as a show more spoiler.) She's been convinced by what she'll soon find is an all-too-good-to-be-true brochure describing homesteading in Montana. The brochure claims winters in Montana are milder than those in the U.S. south, but as one of the new neighbors tells Adelaide, "This land tries to kill us every day."

Adelaide is one of only three Black women in her new, scattered community. People help each other out, not so much from generosity, but from the knowledge they might be facing desperate need at any time. Offer a service to your neighbor; then you can demand help in your turn. There's a certain level of of cross-gender, cross-race acceptance, but it doesn't run deep.

Lone Women simultaneously offers an account of survival in a harsh world and a roller coaster of destruction at the times the trunk comes unlocked. Even if neither horror nor historical fiction are among you favorite reading material, you should give this book a try. Seriously. You'll experience some real surprises.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own. show less

Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review.

How does Victor LaValle do this! I am mad at myself for gulping this book down, but I could not slow myself. At one point I had to say go slower, go slower, you are getting to the end, and I was not able to slow down. I needed a great horror book and LaValle per usual delivers. The characters are so damn good. The writing is lyrical. The flow is top-notch. The setting is perfect (Montana in the show more 1900s). The ending is too. I got nothing to quibble about. I would warn people though that this is horror novel, so there is some blood and other things that may make you squeamish as a reader.

"Lone Women" follows 31 year old Adelaide Henry. Adelaide seems to be on the run from something. Leaving behind her family farm and the secrets it holds, she leaves with nothing but a traveling bag and a steamer trunk. She decides to leave California for the state of Montana because she has read clippings before about how a lone woman can end up settling and gaining land in that state. And she hopes it is far away enough to hide her secrets. Of course, things don't go as planned, and Adelaide ends up having to decide to tell the truth of her family to her new friends or keep running.

Adelaide was great. I felt for her. A woman in her thirties who was tied to her parents (unwilling) because of a dark secret. A Black (or Negro woman as she is referred to in the story) has very few options in 1914 in America, but she is determined to still go on, though part of her wonders why she is bothering. Her traveling by ship to Seattle and then by train to Montana shows how tough she is.

The other characters we meet, Bertie Brown and Fiona and Grace and her child Sam are wonderful. I loved Bertie and Fiona and wanted a short story about them and how they met. Grace and Sam and the secrets they shared were a surprise, but of course you realize this is why they were drawn to Adelaide and she to them. I am still surprised that LaValle is able to bring all of these people to life in just a little over 200 pages. Not a word is wasted. We also get some other characters who you learn to worry about since some learn Adelaide's secret, like the Mudges, and then the Reeds's.

The writing was fantastic. At times it may seem a bit repetitive, but it's because Adelaide is left haunted by the words her mother did and did not say to her. And at times, her mother's ghost walks besides her.

The setting of Montana in this time period was bleak. It seems like anything could and would kill you. And you can see how many flocked to the Reed's and the couple's supposed charity. But of course all charity comes with strings. I also thought it was great that LaValle is able to show how Adelaide how to carry herself differently in Montana since she was Black. Even though all of the people she meets at one point are white. I was surprised a bit by her "romance" in the book because I wondered how something like that would have been taken back then. In the end though it ended up not mattering much.

The ending was great. I loved the idea behind it and smiled. Fantastic read! 5 stars!! show less