That Victor LaValle has a distinct and compelling authorial voice is a given. Thankfully, his new novel, LONE WOMEN, doesn’t disappoint. LaValle hooks readers right away with a fierce protagonist and a challenging setting. He keeps it up with an approachable yet literary style and a set of interesting narrative twists.

It’s 1915, and Adelaide Henry is fleeing her family farm in Lucerne Valley, California, the only home she has ever known. She is taking with her just one travel bag and a very heavy steamer trunk as she makes her way to Montana, where she plans to homestead. She leaves behind the house that she shared with her parents --- in flames --- and their bodies are inside. In the trunk is the “curse” that murdered them before Adelaide destroyed the evidence. The journey, which includes ships, trains and wagon rides, is hard, but it’s not nearly as difficult as life in Montana is from day one.

"LONE WOMEN is masterful, timely, confrontational, surprising and poignant. It is a gorgeous look at identity and second chances, what weighs us down and how we can help each other soar."

As a lone Black woman, Adelaide is vulnerable and is worried about her past catching up with her. When the creature that is the curse of her family gets loose, it perpetrates a terrible violence that threatens her life on the plains and her new relationships in the small town of Big Sandy. Then another act of violence, this time at the hands of a different kind of monster --- the human kind --- against her neighbors, provides both a distraction and an even more immediate danger.

Adelaide meets Grace Price and her son, Sam, soon after settling into the small, drafty cabin on her land. Grace also is a lone woman and has secrets of her own. Grace and Sam are attacked by the Mudges, a family that Adelaide knows to be deadly liars and thieves. She also befriends Bertie Brown, the only other Black woman in the area, and Fiona Wong, Bertie’s Chinese-American partner.

Each woman shares the kinds of sorrows that haunt Adelaide, and she eventually begins to confide in them about the monster that she brought across the west in the trunk and the heavy burden that has been hers to shoulder. Their responses are different from what she had imagined, and they help her start to see the creature --- and herself --- in a new light. In contrast to this powerful sorority are the Big Sandy elites, led by Jack and Jerrine Reed and the Mudges.

There are all kinds of bloodshed in LONE WOMEN and truths obscured, and the monsters are not always obvious. LaValle transcends genre here, even as he draws on the best aspects of horror and western. In many ways, this is a great American tale of redemption. But it is also deeply critical of the American treatment of women, people of color, and those targeted for loving who they do or just for being themselves. Even with all these themes and motifs, LaValle is totally in control of his story, and his characters feel real --- flawed, brave and ever-growing.

LONE WOMEN is masterful, timely, confrontational, surprising and poignant. It is a gorgeous look at identity and second chances, what weighs us down and how we can help each other soar.