Booked & Printed

by Laurel Flores Fantauzzo

To escape is a goal that, paradoxically, binds criminals and victims alike. Criminals scheme to flee from accountability, or to break free from prison walls. Escaping is what potential victims attempt, too, in order to evade the clutches of a fearsome perpetrator, or to break free from the circumstances of danger and deprivation formed by larger forces. This month, Booked and Printed visits protagonists engaged in the attempt to make a pivotal getaway, be they perpetrators or innocents.

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In Smothermoss, Alisa Alering’s debut novel, two sisters come of age in rural Appalachia. Shaped by the shadow of the Cold War, the youngest, Angie, is obsessed by the action movies and military threats of the era. She frequently launches into protective combat fantasies with makeshift weapons. The eldest, Sheila, is riven by quiet longings. She is drawn thin and quiet, refusing food, and proceeding dutifully with household chores and an overnight dishwashing job. Their mother, Bonnie, works the midnight shift at a local hospital for indigent, mentally ill patients.

The family leads a hardscrabble existence, counting each meager dollar, growing their own food, and foraging from what the terrain will offer. When two women campers are found brutally murdered on the mountain that supports their home, Angie and Sheila will face the threat of a perpetrator at large, all the while moving through their own, dramatic growing pains.

Smothermoss provides one of the most unique, genre-synthesizing mysteries of recent memory. Of particular note is the heartrending, victim-focused murder scene early on in the novel: The final moments of the young women’s lives will stay with readers for a long time to come. Alering’s sense of setting is also indelible. Nineteen-eighties Appalachia comes alive with evocations of both the mountainous land and the unforgettable residents who call it home. The supernatural world moves alongside the everyday lives of the sisters with memorable frankness. Angie draws monsters, a childlike habit that takes on great weight. At her dishwashing job, Sheila makes a friend with surprising, powerful characteristics. Sheila in particular struggles to free herself from a constriction that has haunted her for as long as she can remember, and she works every moment for a different life.

As criminal danger grows nearer to their home, the sisters will have to call on their knowledge of the mountain that raised them, and decide on what relationship they will have with each other for the rest of their lives. They will face the choice to escape the mountain, or to fight the unseen forces threatening their home. Readers will feel fully invested in what path they take.

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Laurie Notaro’s new novel The Murderess opens on 1931 Los Angeles. Two trunks arrive at Union Station, putrid and dripping with dark liquid. Train employees are surprised to find that the trunks’ owner is a slight, lovely, white woman: Winnie Ruth Judd. She claims the trunks contain her husband’s medical instruments. Since they are too heavy for her to carry alone, she says she will return for them later. When the employees open the trunks in Judd’s absence, the true horror of their contents sets the Los Angeles media aflame.

Judd’s following decisions form the book’s most compelling section. She attempts a bizarre and elaborate escape around Los Angeles. Judd hides behind the curtain of a downtown department store where she used to work, emerging only when the store closes. She makes her way to a sanitorium at the foot of the Altadena mountains, where she once was a patient. There, she steals bottles of milk and food scraps, and she rests in a vacant structure. All the while, she nurses a terrible injury: a bullet lodged in her hand. As authorities close in on her and her own husband urges her surrender, the truth of her own brutality will slowly arrest her own psyche.

The Murderess is the result of painstaking research. Winnie Ruth Judd was a real criminal who receives full sympathy in Notaro’s telling. The full breadth of Judd’s life is included in the book, down to her unexpectedly mundane obituary. The effect, in those sections, is a breathless recounting more aligned with the techniques of true crime nonfiction.

Elsewhere, the book is in full fiction mode, describing the nature of the relationship Judd’s victims may have shared with each other, and evoking the possible roots of Judd’s own mental suffering. In pursuing a novelistic bent with true crime research techniques, the book seems to suffer from over-extension. It sometimes relies on a plethora of true-life details to fill pages, rather than emphasizing particular, narrative moments to fit the particular themes of this novel and its characters.

Nonetheless, The Murderess is an immersive look at one of the most notorious women criminals of the twentieth century, one whose attempted escapes over her lifetime once caught the attention of a nation.

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In Wes Blake’s Pineville Trace, a former southern revival preacher befriends a cat he names Buffalo. At his minimum security prison, Frank Russet is a convicted fraudster, and nearly at the end of his sentence. It’s the late 1970s, and a new life awaits him in no time at all, if he’ll only wait a little longer.

Instead, Russet decides to escape. He follows Buffalo past the permeable prison boundaries and through the eastern Kentucky landscape. In doing so, he attempts to forge a new identity, combing through memories of his revival preaching, as he makes his way to Canada. Through his mental recounting and his movement through seasons and states, Buffalo is Russet’s ever-loyal companion.

While most prison breaks may involve dramatic chases and near misses, Pineville Trace is a quiet odyssey, an unexpectedly meditative journey of a minor outlaw. The convicted criminal’s friendship with his adopted cat is surprisingly spiritual and touching. The feline companion roots Russet to the physical world, and his care for Buffalo sustains him through a new search for home. Russet’s escape may have been ill-advised for his own journey as a rehabilitated citizen, but his journey proves rewarding for readers.