Sarah Elaine Smith is interested in frustrating expectations. That’s partly why she based her darkly subversive debut novel, Marilou Is Everywhere, in her home region of Greene County, Pennsylvania, a rural place as desolate as it is teeming with life—where, she writes, lakes sparkle under the sun and kids who drive “poorly-maintained Pontiacs” merrily swig cough syrup behind the local gas station.  

It’s in this town that a young girl vanishes. Smith is well aware of the timeworn trope of the “missing girl” and how it’s used to lure readers. “Missing girl [novels] are a special kind of catnip,” the author says, admitting that she has a “tremendous appetite for true-crime stories.” But recently, she’s been reckoning with the utter fascination and escape she finds in these dark narratives. “What happens to the actual victim of a crime as a result of my appetite for this stuff? What’s going on when I consume these stories?” 

Through the lens of her main character, Cindy Stoat—a lovable yet woefully misguided 14-year-old—Smith addresses these questions while bringing us into a paradoxical world that dazzles and terrifies in equal measure. A product of poverty and neglect, Cindy lives an isolated existence that’s been more strained by her mother’s recent abandonment. When she hears that her brother’s girlfriend, Jude, has disappeared, she obsesses over it. Similarly, the rest of the town delights more than despairs in the tragedy that has disrupted their routines. “Their eyes were glass burned up with joy,” Smith writes, “with the kind of light you don’t see except in happy people.” 

Jude was mixed race, but in Greene County there’s no middle ground between black and white. Rumors around town spread that she’d “gotten into drugs” and that her mother, Bernadette—an intellectual who flaunted her “high-tone” lifestyle—was finally being put in her place. “If trouble found Bernadette at last, it meant there was law,” Smith writes. 

When Cindy decides to take it upon herself to care for the ailing, alcoholic Bernadette, things become further complicated. In her unstable condition, Bernadette mistakes Cindy for Jude. Cindy, seeing an opportunity to escape her own reality, heedlessly takes it. “I wasn’t trying to become Jude,” Cindy explains. “But I wanted to disappear, and she had left a space. When I stepped into that space, I vanished from my senses.” In Bernadette, Cindy gains a mother, and, posing as Jude, she’s no longer part of a town “bent into catastrophe postures” by “heroin, WIC vouchers, fluoride, Miller Time, a caustic species of aloneness, perfectly well‐intentioned social workers, postindustrial blight, single‐A football, pepperoni rolls, and things like that.”

It’s easy to oversimplify and sensationalize narratives we don’t fully understand as a way to evade deeper, more painful truths. Smith renders this in the precarity of Bernadette and Cindy’s relationship, wherein twisted affections are served alongside unutterable secrets, and in the town’s reluctance to assume responsibility for anything. Though it’s clear she’s also living on the fringes, it’s Cindy’s whiteness that allows her to carry on behaving as she does with little consequence.

“Cindy is a shrewd observer,” Smith explains, “but she doesn’t have this consciousness for racial justice.” Smith used Greene County’s rural identity to investigate that discrepancy while also illuminating how Appalachia has occupied our “national imagination” as this dark region where only these transgressions occur. “Sometimes I wonder if that’s Appalachia being a stand-in, a shadowy place where it’s possible to imagine these things happening, rather than up close.”

Having grown up in rural America, Smith knows the deep fissures that reside within it. But she also knows of its wild beauty, and it emerges in the canny tenderness with which she writes about Greene County. “I wanted to write with tremendous care about this place even though I have a complicated relationship to it,” Smith says. “Ultimately I do love it. And when you love something, you want people to see it as it is.”  

Stephanie Buschardt is a writer living in Brooklyn.