Melissa Faliveno presents Hemlock in conversation with Megan Giddings

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.

Melissa Faliveno is the author of the debut essay collectionTomboyland, named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, New York Public Library,Oprah Magazine,Electric Literature, andDebutiful, and recipient of a 2021 Award for Outstanding Literary Achievement from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her writing has appeared inEsquire,Paris Review,Kenyon Review,Literary Hub,Ms. magazine,Bitch magazine, andBrooklyn Rail, among others, and in the anthologiesSex and the Single Womanand the forthcomingHit Repeat Until I Hate Music. Born and raised in small-town Wisconsin and a longtime resident of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, she teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina and lives in the woods outside Chapel Hill.

Megan Giddings is an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota. Her novel, Lakewood, was published by Amistad in 2020. It was one of New York Magazine’s 10 best books of 2020, one of NPR’s best books of 2020, a Michigan Notable book for 2021, was a finalist for two NAACP Image Awards, and a finalist for a 2020 LA Times Book Prize in The Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction category. Her second novel, The Women Could Fly (Amistad 2022), was named one of The Washington Post’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy novels of 2022, one of Vulture’s Best Fantasy books of 2022, and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. In Fall 2023, she was the Picador Professor at Leipzig University. Her third novel, Meet Me at the Crossroads, was one of NPR’s Books We Love in 2025, one of Town and Country’s 20 Best Books of 2025, and one of The Washington Post’s Best Science Fiction/Speculative Novels of 2025. Her first short story collection, Black Arts, will be published in 2026.

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