Midway through Melissa Faliveno’s Hemlock: A Novel, her protagonist, Sam, awakens after a night of many beers and shots, disoriented in the thick of the Wisconsin Northwoods.

The ground is wet with dew. Damp leaves cling to her body. She has no idea where she is nor how she got there. On the forest floor where she finds herself, far below the canopy above, small shade-tolerant trees and plants survive in the low light, providing a vital layer of sustenance for the wildlife living among them. As Sam emerges from her oblivion, confused but unafraid, the word “understory” pops into her mind.

“She whispered the word to herself and thought of things that live in the light, and things that live in the dark. How whole worlds and realities can exist in things unspoken and unseen,” Faliveno writes. “How there’s a story told aloud, in the open, above the surface of things, and there’s a story beneath it, that one must look much harder to find.”

Hemlock, Faliveno’s debut novel, is as layered as the Northwoods, a vast expanse of dense coniferous and hardwood forests, glacial lakes and rustic cabins and cottages. It’s a story of self-discovery — a dreamlike exploration into addiction, inherited generational trauma, gender identity and sexuality. It’s also a story that defies genre.

In Hemlock, Faliveno, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill creative writing professor, pulls from Gothic tropes: a gloomy cabin in an isolated area, a non-traditional damsel in distress, ancestral curses and a talking deer that —no matter how hokey it sounds — works. At the same time it’s a love story, sinister and sultry, and a tribute to nature that teeters between reality and fantasy.

We meet Sam, a 38-year-old Wisconsinite, when she’s had 10 stable, booze-free months with her boyfriend, Stephen, and their cat, Monster. She’s on her way from their Brooklyn apartment to “Hemlock,” her family’s desolate cabin nestled in the heart of the Northwoods. Once a place of family togetherness for Sam and her parents, a creepy vibe had settled into the cabin ever since her mother’s eerie walk into the woods, never to be seen again.

As the miles and days roll by, Sam’s fragile grip on reality becomes even more tenuous. In her dreams, the cabin is a huge, “hulking, looking thing with endless doors and hallways, walls that seemed to breathe; a maze of passages that changed shape and stretched on forever; into nothing.” In reality, it is “a normal little house, with four normal walls, a normal little porch and chimney” that her father built for retirement but now is ready to sell.

As Sam replaces broken floorboards and repairs things, she’s living in virtual seclusion, a marked difference from the urban frenzy of New York City. The rot of the cottage and surrounding area hollowed out by recession creeps into her mind and she begins to slip back into old behaviors. Just one beer turns into one more. Then a sixpack. Then one brandy old-fashioned, and another before an empty bottle awaits her on the counter in the morning. Amid the slip from sobriety, Sam wrestles with whether she wants to return to her boyfriend, her job as a magazine editor and the life she built in New York.

The novel — a probe of the indecipherable space between one place and another, one gender and another, one sexuality and another and past and present— is not always an easy read. It can be frustrating and exhausting watching Sam settle into a buzz that, no matter how hard she tries, cannot quiet the persistent whisper of her emotional unraveling.

Can the Midwest she fled ever be home again? Does she identify as a man, woman or something else more fluid that’s not so easily defined? Can she eschew the booze that is part of her culture and escape the throes of addiction passed down from her grandmother to her mother and on to her?

Somehow, though, Faliveno’s vivid and descriptive writing keeps pulling you back in. She makes you feel like a confidant, a trusted but objective friend who can help Sam as she tries to break free from the expectations of a world with deeply entrenched norms and stereotypes.

Faliveno is very introspective, pondering a wide range of topics, any one of which probably could have anchored a book. Despite the dark themes in Hemlock, there is beauty in the ugliness and light in the understory.