Monsters Real & Imaginary

A woman stalks through a house, dousing its rooms in gasoline. She lingers over the corpses of her parents, tucked into the bed in which she was conceived. She strikes a match and sets the place ablaze. She walks out unscathed—physically, anyway; the narrator later notes that “it hadn’t been the fire that burned at her but the guilt.” A wagon waits outside—the year is 1915—and she loads it with a steamer trunk, quite heavy, and makes her escape. She is Adelaide, and she is, we are told, a fugitive; she is, we assume, a killer.

The opening pages of Lone Women, Victor LaValle’s fifth novel, are briskly expository: Adelaide’s parents were homesteaders in California, part of a cohort of “Negro citizens” encouraged to head west in the second half of the nineteenth century. “They weren’t going to get a fair shot in Arkansas, that was for damn sure.” The family has a reputation—“queer folk” is the assessment of an acquaintance. “Keep to your property. Don’t visit with others. Never speak a word in church.” Adelaide is thirty-one and has spent her life in that reclusive household, working in the kitchen or the fields. Perhaps the bloody corpses of her parents are the cost of her liberation.

There’s something familiar about a woman fleeing a house in flames. There’s something ominous about our not knowing what’s in that trunk; Adelaide strokes the thing “as if her touch could calm it.” Probably gothic is the word for all this; that’s surely why Adelaide takes with her a copy of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, so often reread that it’s falling apart.

But this first scene is the sort of thing a nineteenth-century novel would save for an illuminating flashback after hundreds of pages; Lone Women’s beginning in medias res is contemporary, like the cold open to a cop procedural. No surprise: LaValle is a seasoned remix artist. He’s previously found material in horror, a genre with many established subcategories—the supernatural, the folkloric, the apocalyptic, the fantastic—though he is principally interested in monsters. He used the figure of the monster in the coming-of-age story The Ecstatic (2002), the psychological thriller The Devil in Silver (2012), and the novel of fatherhood The Changeling (2017).

Lone Women is a historical novel, which is a change of pace for LaValle. It allows him to deploy the hallmarks of horror’s predecessor, the gothic: a prevailing atmosphere of menace, a dramatic landscape, characters isolated from society, an imperiled heroine. LaValle is not interested in fright for its own sake, though, and Lone Women is not a machine built to scare. It’s an inquiry into something he hasn’t before reckoned with on the page: the lot of the Black woman in the American project.

This work of fiction began with fact. In his acknowledgments LaValle describes happening upon the scholarly book Montana Women Homesteaders: A Field of One’s Own (2009), edited by the Canadian historian Sarah Carter: “Did I know there had been lone women homesteaders? Women who didn’t need a man to cosign for their tracts of land? Did I know this right wasn’t reserved solely for white women?” He did not, and I shared his surprise. But such is the chauvinism of the present: simpler to imagine the past as hopelessly benighted.

A novel is a lie by definition, but the historical novel must establish its proximity to the truth. Sometimes writers manage this through style—diction that approximates the sound of a forgotten milieu, a formality that strikes the modern ear as “authentic.” It’s a way of assuring readers that the author has done their homework. To me this often feels like affect, akin to American actors putting on plummy accents when performing Shakespeare plays, even those set in Italy or Denmark.

It’s plain that LaValle has read all the Brontës and understands what the gothic demands. The Montana night’s darkness is absolute, obliterating the mountains themselves and making it possible to spot candlelight in the distance. The natural world is menacing, the wind not indifferent but “a force bent on killing.” LaValle can’t give us a castle on the western plains so settles instead for an opera house that can accommodate two hundred and has gas lighting to boot. For all these old-fashioned flourishes, LaValle remains himself as a stylist—the conversational voice of the acknowledgments page isn’t far from the sound of the novel. Here, as in his previous books, the sentences are not spare but direct, the chatty dialogue free of any self-conscious filigree intended to remind readers that we’re in the America of a century ago. Indeed, the prose of Lone Women feels more straightforward than that of LaValle’s previous novel, The Changeling, which is set in our own time.

You can’t judge a book by its cover, but Lone Women’s features a woman in period dress, a bid for the attention of a certain reader, a promise of sorts, though one that LaValle intends to break. Maybe genre is mostly a matter for marketing departments, or almost a recipe: mix eggs a certain way and you have a quiche, do it differently and you end up with a flan. These rules can be bent—often it’s best when they are, as when Agatha Christie reveals one of her narrators as the killer. But to tinker with the parameters of a given form entails risk; no one who expects quiche wants a spoonful of flan.

By this point LaValle’s readers know him to be a trickster. His work is always a hybrid of genres (horror and what’s termed literary fiction, which is perhaps not often enough acknowledged as adhering to its own conventions). His novels are not only interested in monsters but are monsters themselves: defying easy categorization, uncannily both one thing and another, and therefore unsettling.

After the opening crime, Adelaide flees California for the Pacific Northwest, “the only Negro woman on the ship. Certainly the only one who was a passenger at least.” That archaic “Negro” helps us understand the extent of Adelaide’s isolation, her only counterpart some unseen Black woman possibly traveling as a lady’s maid. A certain reader might find such observations too contemporary, breaking the spell of historical fidelity. Others might find them corrective: the past rendered not in the sepia of nostalgia but something approaching full color. Maybe those are the form’s two possibilities—to depict a comforting past that never quite existed, or to illuminate the present by traveling back in time. LaValle’s novel, constructed around a Black woman at the start of the twentieth century and attuned to questions of race and sex, is plainly interested in the latter.

In Seattle, Adelaide’s plan is revealed. She was inspired by a letter she read in a magazine two years before, which so affected her that she’d kept it secreted beneath her mattress:

The federal government had been giving out 320-acre plots of land for homesteading, only requiring a “person”—that wording was vitally vague—to live on the land for three years, making it habitable and cultivating crops. If, at the end of those three years, the person had done all this, then the land would become theirs forever.

Intending to take advantage of a loophole that might provide liberty to even a Black woman, Adelaide visits a middleman and selects a plot of land not far from the Canadian border. She continues by rail to Big Sandy, a small town that lends some perspective on the startling landscape: “Maybe this is how Moses felt as he walked between the parted waters of the Red Sea. Look at God.” She shares a wagon to her parcel of land with another homesteader, a woman named Mudge, and her four blind sons. They are beset by wind that has “the churning quality of an ocean, a similar strength, but felt more deadly because it remained unseen”—hard not to think of Wuthering Heights—and eventually seek a night’s refuge in an abandoned hotel.

In the morning the Mudge family has mysteriously vanished. Adelaide’s wagon driver is not worried by this, even if the reader is. This man tells Adelaide of the region’s other Black woman (with the satisfying name of Bertie Brown). He reassures her that the locals’ antipathy is mostly directed at the Chinese and the “red man,” and anyway most people are bonded by a common enemy: “This land is trying to kill every single one of us, let me tell you.”

The homestead is mean, its well water not fit for human consumption, its cellar filled with the previous inhabitant’s preserves, all spoiled. Adelaide considers suicide but is stopped by the thought of her wagon driver returning to discover her dead body and her locked trunk: “He would open it. And that would be the end of him.” The novel doesn’t dwell on this, and a convenient deus ex machina—the wagon driver does return and sells the Mudge family’s possessions to Adelaide—saves LaValle from getting into the details of how Adelaide survives her first weeks there.

Instead we see her welcomed into society, such as it is: first meeting her neighbors, Grace Price and her young son, Sam, then riding horses with some genial cowboys, Matthew and his uncle Finn, and even attending a local fete that goes all night. At this celebration, she takes care not to drink too much: “She was with them, but not of them. Best to always remain a bit more aware.” Several guests confuse Adelaide for the other Black Montanan. “One woman simply wouldn’t believe Adelaide wasn’t Bertie and turned belligerent when Adelaide wouldn’t agree.” Nowadays we’d call that a microaggression, a modern coinage for an experience that may well be timeless.

After this party Adelaide and the cowboy Matthew fall into bed together. I appreciated Adelaide’s clarity: “She wasn’t in love, but affection and caution would do well enough out here on the plains.” None of the Brontës would have been able to get away with this—“When she wrapped her legs around his waist, he seemed to lift her whole body so he could enter her”—and too bad for them.

It’s a convention of many stories that sexual pleasure precipitates disaster. And I’ve read enough of LaValle’s other books that I shouldn’t have been surprised that Lone Women reveals itself as a novel of horror, a monster lurking within it. It is a testament to his writing that I was taken aback by just what was inside Adelaide’s trunk, a thing that emerges during her postcoital sleep. It’s unclear whether Adelaide was a virgin, but she wakes to Matthew’s blood, not her own, “spread on the floor and across the walls and windows.” As ever, the narrator puts things simply: “It was out.”

About that it: “Some would call it a creature. But all her life Adelaide and her family had called it something else: their curse.” We never quite get to see it, but we are told of its short, thin legs and sharp teeth. It is covered in scales that are “impervious to blades and bullets” and that bloody anyone who comes into contact with them. Well, not Adelaide, who is mysteriously the only human who can soothe this monster. After its attack on Matthew, she coaxes the beast back into its cage with a song:

Their father once said that nature had designed Adelaide for this very purpose. Why else would a girl as strong as her be born into this family, if she wasn’t meant to yoke the thing they’d been punished with?

That their is telling, the thing almost a sibling to Adelaide: “It arrived on our doorstep the same day, the same minute, my mother gave birth to me,” she explains to Matthew. “She received her blessing and her curse in an instant. Was it left there? Did it bubble up from the depths of hell? No one could say.”

At the start of the book LaValle allowed us to believe that Adelaide had killed her parents. He even provided a plausible explanation: “A woman is a mule…. Those might’ve been the first words Eleanor Henry ever shared with her daughter…. Eleanor meant to prepare her daughter, train her up in endurance and acceptance.” Adelaide might be a murderer, but the reader understands such violence—justifiable when opposing a drudgery that borders on enslavement. Picture a woman’s lot in life, at least a century ago—who wouldn’t kill to get free?

The moment of the monster’s unveiling marks a shift that clarifies some of LaValle’s strategy. Perhaps his unfussy style signals not his disinterest in the conventions of historical fiction but his suitability for horror. All novels are predicated on a suspension of disbelief—no matter the genre, we’re reading about people who never existed. But in the realm of the supernatural, readers must accept still more. Understanding this, LaValle has settled on telling it straight, forgoing stylistic embellishments. Readers of horror know that the tale should not be fact-checked; as with fairy tale, folklore, or myth, the inventions of the story are less important than its moral.

This is not to say that this supernatural element won’t be an impediment to many readers. We want to make sense of a story, and we want the stories we read to make sense. The monster on the page isn’t especially scary. It struck me as a device for making literal the particular burden of Adelaide’s sex, something to which the title gestures. The lot of the woman in 1915, perhaps salient still, is to be sister, caretaker, enchantress. In a word: a mule.

When Rochester tells Jane Eyre of his wife, Bertha Mason, he refers to the woman as “a monster.” His account: “Glad was I when I at last got her to Thornfield, and saw her safely lodged in that third-story room, of whose secret inner cabinet she has now for ten years made a wild beast’s den—a goblin’s cell.”

Maybe LaValle is simply doing Brontë one better, deploying an actual monster instead of a madwoman. In that novel Bertha is a shadow of Jane Eyre and a captive of Rochester; in this, the beast is both counterpart to and captive of Adelaide. The monster is as inscrutable to the reader and to the characters of Lone Women as Bertha is to Jane: spectral, even frightening. Adelaide addresses the monster hopelessly, as it seems to lack the power of language:

All these years, I wish you could tell me the nature of this curse, demon. Is it to make us reviled by our neighbors? Cast out from society? Even if you told me that, told me anything, I could endure it better. But maybe that’s the whole point of your evil. No answers. No explanations. The silence is the worst part of this suffering.

A lot begins to happen, perhaps too much, the plot taking up that question: Why is Adelaide reviled by her neighbors, cast out from society?

The monster surprises its captor with the power of flight; it ranges free across the very landscape that Adelaide was warned was the locals’ common enemy. The mysterious Mudge family reenters the story. They are not, it turns out, a naive homesteader and her four blind children but a criminal and her accomplices, a Ma-Barker-and-sons enterprise of rustlers and thieves. When the monster kills this evil matriarch, her sons swear vengeance. (Here Adelaide’s dead mother visits her with a warning—“They’ll come for you”—much as Jane Eyre’s dead mother urges her daughter to flee Rochester’s house.)

The title indicates the novel’s interest in more than one woman. So we are given the tales of Bertie Brown, the other Black woman in the area, and of Fiona Wong, the local laundress (a “Celestial,” per the vintage epithet for the Chinese), and of Jerrine Reed, the wife of one of Big Sandy’s Brahmins. While LaValle is adept at juggling so much narrative material, my attention flagged when the story broadened its focus beyond Adelaide. The novel even enters the consciousness of the beast, its thoughts rendered in verse:

After making a meal of those horses,
After a supper of blood,
Rest.
Even a demon dreams.

Giving the monster words is a way of defanging it; I feared it much more when it was inscrutable.

It’s Jerrine Reed’s story that’s most notable here. Rich enough to spend her time on civic projects (she is helping to develop the aforementioned opera house, hoping to elevate the small town’s stature) and comfortable by virtue of her whiteness, Jerrine is still in her way as isolated as the rest of the women: “As a woman of authority, she felt there was a particular loneliness to her position.” Childless, she has plans to seize Sam Price, the child of Adelaide’s friend Grace.

We’ve understood that Grace is a single mother, but in the course of the story we learn that that’s because she murdered her husband. She is also a lone woman because she’s been raising her child, born a girl, as a boy. LaValle confidently reveals the story’s twists. Earlier he establishes that Bertie and Fiona are not only outcasts in the town of Big Sandy—they are lovers:

Fiona reached down and pulled the counterpane until Bertie could no longer be seen. She lifted the bedspread and peeked into the darkness there. Her breathing slowed and the feelings she’d carried with her since they left town were set down, put away, at least for now.
Fiona opened her legs wider.

Sam’s sex at birth and his decision to change it are handled with similar frankness. It’s not a revision of history to understand that history has always contained a breadth of human experience. With this pair of clandestine lovers and a child choosing his own destiny, LaValle is reinforcing his central point about the liberty available to women.

Jerrine spirits Sam away to her house—to an attic, notably—and her impulse is revealed to be not maternal but spiteful. She did once have a child. “Mine didn’t have fingers,” she explains to the captive Sam. “It had claws.” Jerrine invites one of the Mudge boys, now in her husband’s employ, to rape Sam. It’s hard to make sense of Jerrine’s depravity, though it seems to be in keeping with a certain convention that the do-gooder be revealed as fundamentally evil.

The revelation of Jerrine as mother to a monster of her own doesn’t advance anything in the story or deepen how we think of her. And it follows Adelaide’s too-long-delayed admission—the demon was not left on the doorstep, as she has claimed, but was actually her twin sister, Elizabeth:

The midwife set Adelaide on her mother’s chest, but when the second child was birthed, the midwife ran out of the room. She wasn’t empty-handed. She carried the second child in her hands. What was she going to do? Throw the child in a well? Dash its skull against a rock?

It was Adelaide’s father who intervened:

He took that child from the midwife’s arms even as she cursed him and told him she would not step back into that farmhouse to help Eleanor. What did they do, she demanded, to cause such a demon to be born?

This is a question that the reader must grapple with, one I struggled to answer.

The pacing is brisk enough that it’s almost forgivable that this final twist confuses more than it clarifies. The reader is left to work out whether Jerrine’s demon is some consequence of her fundamental evil, and if so, to extrapolate what that might mean about Adelaide’s mother, never quite developed as a character. If the beast is simply a caprice of fate, we’re so outside the realm of logic that perhaps we can overlook the oddity of this fate being doled out to two women.

But we don’t have time to dwell on it. The people of Big Sandy are aware of Elizabeth’s presence in their midst, visited upon them by Adelaide. Thus Jerrine intends to cleanse Big Sandy of these cursed sisters, as well as of Bertie Brown and Fiona Wong—it’s not lost on the reader what makes the other women different from the rest of the community. “I can’t be the only one here who understands the world contains both the righteous and the damned,” Jerrine announces to a gathering of her neighbors as she stages a lynching (on the stage of the opera house, no less—LaValle has a good instinct for drama).

It’s no surprise that Elizabeth, whom we have understood as nonhuman, an agent of chaos or perhaps evil, now offers salvation. She (no longer “it”) intercedes, freeing the women. LaValle furnishes his lone women with a happier ending than might be warranted. They settle into a ghost town and draw others like them into a kind of feminist utopia, one in which even Elizabeth has a place:

A town of six became sixteen. Thirty. Sixty-five. Some came alone, others with their children. Adelaide welcomed the adults; Elizabeth greeted the kids. The little ones adored her—every child wants to learn that dragons are real—and each day she basked in their love.

Being welcomed into human society has quelled Elizabeth’s bloodlust, a narrative turn that seems to come from children’s stories; the monster was never to be feared—it was merely misunderstood.

The coda’s chatty tone—“Where did they go?” the narrator asks, in the voice of a parent reading a bedtime story—somehow reinforces that fairy tale, folklore, and myth are the best ways to understand Lone Women. LaValle knows that we will want to make sense of what has just happened, so he tells it straight: “You might read histories about this time and place and never find mention of these women, any testimony that folks like them were here at all.”

LaValle could have made the same point, told essentially the same tale, without a monster, but Elizabeth is the means he’s chosen, and that entails a risk—a reader more intent on understanding this device than in accepting the book’s message, laid out above. In short, it’s not about the monster; it’s about these women. When dealing with myth, there’s that impulse to root around for the moral of the story, and while Lone Women is a surprising hybrid, a strange beast, that takeaway turns out to be quite familiar: the monster is (what else?) us.