Smothermoss is a novel about two sisters in 1980s Appalachia, drawn into the mystery of two murdered hikers. Sheila is seventeen and spends her time tending their garden and rabbits, worrying about her growing certainty that she likes girls, and trying to tame her younger sister, Angie. Angie is twelve, obsessed with Rambo, Russian spies, and her self-created deck of cards that seem to speak to her. When two women are killed on the Appalachian trail, Angie wants to find the murderer, and Sheila is contending with strange visions and a rope-like weight around her neck.

This is a difficult book to define, perhaps marketed with horror and murder mystery elements, but really feeling like an uncanny coming of age novel, perhaps with hints of Appalachian gothic. It is a hazy novel that moves through a summer without that much actually happening, and even the climactic end felt a bit underwhelming, but if you read that as more of a story of two teenage girls and their weirdness, that works a lot better. Sheila and Angie are really memorable characters and were definitely the highlight of the novel, whilst their mother felt like a very absent character, reflecting how much she's not in their lives.

Whilst I was expecting Smothermoss to have more of a horror/mystery plot, I did like its slow uncanny coming of age vibe. It reminded me of other rural gothic type novels about girls coming of age, though I feel like I've not read any Appalachian ones before.

I usually like dark and weird stories but this felt as if reading something that tried too hard to be weird... If that makes sense? Very disjointed stories that were supposed to be connected but I struggled though it.