Lone Women follows Adelaide Henry, a young Black woman from California who comes to Montana to cultivate and eventually claim a plot of land. With her, she carries a steamer trunk tightly locked. 

There are multiple layers of horror at work in this book. The setting alone is eerie, with cabins miles away from each other and from the nearest town; this creates a sense of ‘no one around to hear you scream’ type of isolation, and the land – in winter in particular – comes with real dangers. The community (at least most of it) is far from accepting, and Adelaide as a racialized woman must navigate real uncertainty about the motives of those around her. There are, finally, the more ‘supernatural’ aspects. This is my 2nd time reading Victor LaValle and I really enjoyed this. 

Content warnings: racism, racial slurs, sexism, misogyny, violence, murder, blood, gore, body horror (relatively minor), injury detail, gun violence, animal death, child abuse, transphobia, deadnaming, xenophobia, colonialism