Alisa Alering’s novel Smothermossis a haunting and atmospheric debut.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
“Equal parts gruesome and gorgeous and otherworldly.”
In their own words, here is Alisa Alering’s Book Notes music playlist for their debut novel Smothermoss:
Like Angie and Sheila, the sisters at the heart of Smothermoss, I spent my teen years on the side of a tree-shrouded mountain, without internet access, where the radio reception was crap and only thing I had to listen to in the early years was my mom’s collection of John Denver and Anne Murray records. But eventually there were long car rides to the music store in the mall and $3 cassettes from punk bands with photocopied covers that I could get mailed to me by writing to an address in the back of a zine.
I don’t listen to music while I’m writing. I’ve tried. I thought that’s what real writers do. For a while I thought I could hack it if I stuck to songs with lyrics in languages that I don’t understand or instrumental LoFi Girl background drone. Nope. It makes me anxious and distracts me. It interrupts my own internal rhythm so I can no longer concentrate on the image I’m trying so hard to see and describe on the page.
Luckily, in my teenage years when time was infinite, I spent many, many hours in my bedroom crafting the perfect mix tape, getting the selections and order just right, capturing a mood or something I wanted to tell a person without using my own words, and coming up with just the right title. All that practice stands me in good stead for creating this mood of creepy deep mountain isolation in the mid-’80s. You just have to imagine that the cardboard insert was decorated by Angie, with one of her scribbled monsters seething from the homemade cover.
Helen in the Woods – Torres
If I could choose only one song for this story, this is the one. Sheila and Angie are very much In The Woods. It’s a state of being as well as a place. A W article describes this song as ‘deranged’ and ‘a little sexy’ – which is entirely apt: I would add “fierce” “ominous” and “menacing.” Even though it’s ostensibly about a female stalker, and Sheila, self-effacing, self-denying as she is, would never go that far, her crush on her classmate Juanita is so desperate that it verges on that level of obsessive. Sheila is so knotted up with herself that her feelings for Juanita can never break free of her imagination and into the real world. Isn’t that stalker-adjacent?
Water – PJ Harvey
There has to be a PJ Harvey song. This one is from Rid of Me, one of the few albums I took with me on a solo backpacking trip to Europe in 1992. I sat on the wall of a medieval castle in Spain looking out over the Mediterranean far below listening to it on my Walkman over and over wondering how I was ever going to get where I wanted to be.But this isn’t about me. This is about Sheila in the pivotal scene near the end where she immerses herself in the stream that flows behind her house and emerges changed.
Like Polly Jean demanding that you Prove it to me in the refrain near the end, Sheila dares the world to prove it to her. What ‘it’ is is up for debate. And those dirty guitars grinding away like the bubbling of mud in the bog behind her. I once saw a commentary describing the “violent desire” of PJ Harvey. I think that’s exactly what Sheila fears the most – the existence and expression of her own violent desire. What if she let it out? What if she admitted to all she felt and wanted?
Every PJ Harvey song is what I wish for Sheila. Well, nearly every one. Not so much the Is That All There Is era of despair. But other fine choices would be: Down by the Water, This Is Love, Sheela-na-Gig
Invincible – Pat Benatar
This is Angie’s anthem. In her post-apocalyptic, Russian invasion, nuclear zombie fantasies, she is the hero, and like every good movie hero of the era, like her idol Rambo, she needs a theme song. In her mind, she is invincible. Take those first two lines: The bloody road remains a mystery | The darkness fills the air. Could anything be more Angie? This is essentially the opening shot of every fantasy Angie has. Angie is always ready to stand up and face the enemy.
Invincible is also the theme song from The Legend of Billie Jean, a 1985 teen movie starring Helen Slater. Teenage Billie Jean shoots her adult would-be rapist and goes on the run. She has to cut her hair and bleach it blond because now she’s in disguise. Then she and her brother go on the lam, helped by a cult of girls across the nation who also cut their hair and dress up like her to show their solidarity. Angie would approve so hard. She would approve of the shooting and the hair cutting and the matching outfits and the underground network of supporters. I mean, the title says it all: Billie Jean is a LEGEND. Which Angie knows she will someday be.
A Forest – The Cure
How could I not make this choice? Smothermoss is literally a book about a forest and this has to be the most famous song about a forest. I’m lost in a forest alone. The girl was never there. It’s always the same. I’m running toward nothing. Again and again. This is Sheila and the Boy, this is the hunt for the murderer, this is Angie getting lost in the underground tunnels as she asks the Worm King to lead her to the murderer, this is Sheila escaping from the locked room in the asylum to a tunnel in the forest with the Boy in the rain. This is mood and escape and magic and fantasy. This is the soundtrack of my most vivid teenage years, promising me that there was another place, somewhere far from here, where I might be someone else.
Final Day – Young Marble Giants
I have no idea what this song is actually about (as is the case with all of the best songs) but it mentions rabbits, and I choose to believe it’s about the nuclear apocalypse so it has to be on the list. In my mind, everything about childhood in the 1980s was saturated by the background threat of nuclear annihilation. That one day, without warning, we would all be nuked out of existence. As the night goes out on the final day for the people who never had a say. There is so much noise there is too much heat and the living floor throws you off your feet. I love the heartbeat of the bass line, Alison Statton’s soft clear voice without elaboration, the plain, direct delivery. Sad and terrifying.
Again, this was a matter of not whether to include Kate Bush, but which song to pick. I’m all about atmosphere and vibes and Kate has Sheila vibes all over. Sad and wistful and just the right amount of unhinged. In the asylum where Sheila and her mom work, there is most definitely something up, something that probably has to do with government experiments on the inmates, related to the top-secret fortress in the hollow mountain next door. We were working secretly for the military, our experiment… This is a beautiful song about doing awful things.
Faded Love – Patsy Cline
The sisters’ hard-working mom Bonnie has been disappointed so many times that she’s done with men. She is tough and practical because she has to be. Life isn’t going to get better for her and she knows it. She’s just getting through. She doesn’t have the time or energy to dream much anymore. But she’s secretly sentimental. Every once in a while when she gets a moment of peace she lets herself reminisce about Sheila’s father and the life they might have had, should have had (but honestly probably wouldn’t have had) if he had lived. When she can’t sleep, she listens to Patsy Cline and remembers the good old days swaying in his arms at the Skyline Inn.
Carry Me Home – Hem
…I know you’ll bury him for me. Tell me nothing’s wrong there… Let’s just say that there’s a sisters burying things scene in this book that comes at a pretty significant moment. Angie and Sheila have little in common but this scene reveals the one thing that they do share: they both want desperately to survive – and are willing to go pretty far to do so. They make a pact and they bury that 11111111 and they carry each other. Even if it’s just this one single time, it changes everything.
Svefn-G-Englar – Sigur Rós
The world of Smothermoss isn’t complete unless nature gets its own song. Jónsi’s otherworldly keening on this track sounds to me like the distress of the natural world. Maybe what he’s saying is something terribly mundane, but perhaps weirdly for a writer I’m much less concerned with the literal meaning of the lyrics than the feeling of them. Use whatever dictionary definitions you want, but if the way you pronounce it, the shape of the sound, the way you draw it out, the intonation, feels to me like it means something different, then it does. And this song means the vast timeless voice of the mountain.
Your Love is King – Sade
When Sheila imagines the grown-up fancy dinner she could have with her crush Juanita in glamorous faraway Baltimore, “floaty music” playing on the record player and Juanita wearing a black dress the shows her bare shoulders, this is the kind of music Sheila’s imagining, something slow and slinky and oozing with 1980s saxophone. (See also Smooth Operator, Careless Whisper.) It stands in for the romantic notions Sheila can barely grasp at. All the sophistication of elsewhere that’s available to lucky people who are not her.
A Forest – Bat For Lashes
What better way to (almost) close out than with a reimagining of the Cure classic? Bat for Lashes brings the gloomy girl version of the forest magic. Less forbidding than the original but still all the reverb. This version feels like a fog’s going to come and carry you away until you don’t know where you are. This is Angie and Sheila lost in their own forest, after the burial, when they realize that though they are on their own mountain that they know inside and out, they have no idea where they are.
Suck My Left One – Bikini Kill
Feels Blind – Bikini Kill
I want to give the liberation of Bikini Kill to both Angie and Sheila. Suck My Left One for Angie and Feels Blind for Sheila. There’s a lot of static around the riot grrl movement that stems from its later corporate co-optation and all the gross downstream effects, but I can’t underestimate the impact it had on me when my first copy of Girl Germs arrived in the mailbox at the bottom of our lane. It blew the top of my head off. It was exhilarating. The possibility, the audacity: Girl you can do what you want. Girl dare you to be who you will. Because I want to give these sisters a way the fuck out of there.
Alisa Alering grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of Pennsylvania and now lives in Arizona. After attending Clarion West, their short fiction has been published in Fireside, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet,Podcastle, and Cast of Wonders, among others, and been recognized by the Calvino Prize. A former librarian and science/technology reporter, they teach fiction workshops at the Highlights Foundation.