Town & Country's Must Read Books of Winter 2026 | Most Anticipated in Autostraddle, Literary Hub, and Debutiful | Book Riot's Best Queer Books of January 2026 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.

Hemlock was just a disappointing book. NUBClub chose it because we had hoped it would be another feminist/queer take on a woman becoming a monster (we were fans of Nightbitch and hoping for more.) And while Hemlock does gesture in that direction occasionally, so many elements of the novel were underthought or wrongheaded that no one at NUBClub would defend it. The protagonist Sam doesn't make sense as a character -- she's supposed to be a book editor from New York, but everything she does shows her to be a woodsy repair person and every observation about NYC sounds like it was written by someone whose experience with the city solely consists of word-of-mouth stereotypes. Sam's partner in the city is not a character -- he's a manic pixie dream boy who exists to be something Sam can wrestle with and do wrong by. The only well-explored aspect of Sam is her struggle with alcoholism. Here, Faliveno finds some truth and interesting insights, but even in this aspect, the novel repeats the same scene over and over again (i.e. I wanted one beer and I took three) until it becomes old. The supernatural elements of the book fair no better. What starts as a curious set of blackouts and body transformations builds into a good ambiguity of whether Sam is becoming a werewolf or just falling into a drunk delusion. But despite a lot of track laying of a dangerous hunter in the woods and a curse on Sam's family's cabin, the novel just peters out into some feminist readings of Irish myth and an acceptance of more rural existence. I'm not sure why an author would chose a boring moment of self-discovery over the clear conflict-in-the-dark-woods the story was barreling towards. Oh, and there's a talking deer. Don't ask me to describe it. It's as ridiculous a character as you are imagining. Or maybe it's Sam's dead mother. By the end, we didn't care, and we don't think you will either. NUBClub collectively thinks you should avoid this novel. There are better stories about alcoholism, modern fairy tales, and women becoming monsters of rage for you to spend your time on.