Victor LaValle’s Latest Mixes Horror With a History of the West

LONE WOMEN, by Victor LaValle

Victor LaValle’s enthralling fifth novel, “Lone Women,” opens like a true western, with a scene of dark, bloody upheaval and a hint of vengeance. But nothing in this genre-melding book is as it seems. When we meet Adelaide Henry, the grown daughter of Black farmers, she is in a daze, dumping gasoline all over her family’s farmhouse. We don’t know why she’s doing what she’s doing, what happened to her family or, most important, what else she has or hasn’t done.

She is leaving the toil and lush isolation of Southern California’s Lucerne Valley, where her only neighbors have been other Black farmers, and her only friends her own parents, whose corpses she has tucked into bed to be set aflame. Adelaide will soon escape to the harsh beauty of Montana as one of the “lone” women acquiring a homestead of 320 acres from the federal government. If she can survive three years there, cultivating the land and making it habitable, the land will become hers.

The year is 1915, during the United States’ Progressive Era, a time not often explored in westerns. It is just before Prohibition and women’s suffrage, after the Gold Rush, after the booms and busts, when there are already ghost towns and abandoned mining camps, and the cowboy life is on the wane. The car hasn’t yet replaced the horse, except among the wealthy. Montana is still a place of long distances and isolation, where a farmer turned fugitive like Adelaide feels that she can hide.

The year 1915 is also when D.W. Griffith’s inflammatory film “The Birth of a Nation” is released. It’s an ode to the myth of the Lost Cause, the revisionist history that casts the Old South as a noble victim and slavery as a benevolent institution, and celebrates white supremacist patriarchy. As a single Black woman heading into the Badlands, Adelaide is aware of her proximity to racial and gender violence, but intriguingly, she’s most concerned with what’s inside the staggeringly heavy, locked steamer trunk that she drags from California to Seattle and on to Montana.

A newcomer in a sparsely populated state, Adelaide realizes that she can’t be anonymous, though the white townspeople she encounters are kind at first, thankfully making few inquiries about her past. She longs for intimacy and affection, especially in such a desolate landscape. In her dilapidated cabin on the cusp of winter, Adelaide feels haunted by her secrets, which she has kept thus far because she has been taught to shoulder her burdens in silence. But as she encounters other lone women — the only other Black woman in the area and a young Chinese American — as well as a neighboring widow and her son, she begins to feel that sharing these secrets might be the key to her self-preservation.

Like the mythic Pandora’s box that releases curses on humankind, Adelaide’s locked trunk cannot stay closed, and her bid for freedom from her past reveals its cost. Blood is shed; horses and people go missing. A white lynch mob looms, and the lone women on the margins soon find themselves not so welcome.