I love the idea of a horror book centered around intergenerational trauma, legacy burdens, and Black women homesteading in rural Montana. I think horror is an excellent genre for this to play with showing the very real fears that existed for these women. I think the dynamics of the town itself were very well done, I just had a really hard time keeping the characters straight. This might’ve been my mindset, this might have been the fact that I listen to it on audio, but I never really felt fully sucked into this story. 

I’m finding that I love Victor LaValle’s imagination, but I don’t always love his execution. I liked, didn’t love, The Changeling, which only had a few central characters, and in Lone Women I felt like the characters were not distinct enough for me to fully track the actions in the book. What started off as really distinct characters ended up bleeding together because I think it was the characters’ situations that made them distinct, rather than their character development. Once they were all homesteading and in this nightmare of a homesteading town, the distinctions bled together. 

I would love to hear from some people who loved this book, and the audiobook might have been getting in the way of my enjoyment of this book. I think the book has real potential, I just didn’t feel as engaged with it as I wanted to be.