Not all monsters are imaginary—real life holds plenty that is terrifying—and Lilliam Rivera’s Tiny Threads comes marked by both kinds of fear. The author of four highly regarded novels for young adults, Rivera is making her first foray into adult fiction with a narrative that blends horror, style, and a strong grasp of social inequity.
At the center of Tiny Threads is Samara Martín, a Cuban American journalist newly named executive director, global brand voice, for a house of fashion aptly called the Saprophyte. The company is based in Vernon, a small city five miles from downtown Los Angeles perhaps best known for its meatpacking plants. This, too, is apt, since the haute couture of the Saprophyte’s founder, a designer named Antonio Mota, blends the gorgeous and the violent, much like the fashion of the late Alexander McQueen.
Samara left her home in New Jersey because of trauma. She’s determined to be successful. But small things that seem off begin to accumulate: grunting sounds in her apartment; an unfamiliar name stitched on clothing; scratches on her body after sex. A strict division, both racial and class-based, is maintained between the mostly brown seamstresses and the mostly white marketers and publicists. Under pressure, Samara begins to drink heavily, and as her mind unravels, some truly terrifying supernatural events take place.
Not unlike her protagonist, Rivera was once a journalist and, later, a copywriter for fashion brands. Born and raised in the Bronx, she moved to Southern California for a job at E! Online and later worked in Vernon, where she’d previously gone for sample sales. Even then, she wanted to write about the place, which has been home to generations of working-class people.
“Those areas have this long history of sickness, pollution, all stemming from Vernon, from those factories,” she tells me. Still, she developed a profound connection to the place. This is consistent with her earlier books, which, she notes, are also interested in “the history of buildings and the fingerprints of the people who built them…all the blood that seeps into the soil but also into the buildings themselves.”
Rivera grew up quiet and observant in the housing projects at 183rd Street and Webster Avenue in the Bronx. The drive to write emerged from her shyness. She says it offered a way of making it “easier for me to explore really dark places—or joyful places, when it comes to kids’ books—or things that I wouldn’t necessarily want to share aloud.” As an adult, she has returned frequently to New York to see her parents (who have moved to a different neighborhood), although she refuses to walk past where the family used to live, which she remembers for “both the beautiful community experiences of growing up in the projects and also really scary moments.”
A similar sense of double vision also runs throughout Tiny Threads. Until late in the novel, there is a meaningful uncertainty about whether the supernatural happenings are real or the result of Samara’s alcoholism. Rivera herself is a recovering alcoholic, and in this book, she wanted to address the question of “how do I write about that feeling of blacking out, of not being sure of what you did or didn’t do when you were drinking?… That was the impetus of trying to write this book. The parallel of both the horror—the real horror—and then the horror of addiction.”
The feeling she was going for, she elaborates, is that of a cat holding tight to a ledge, aware she’s going to fall.
For Rivera, the incidents involving alcoholism and sex in Tiny Threads are tied up in Catholic guilt and what it means to be a “good girl,” one who is not supposed to share what’s regarded as private business, such as sexual assault, even though, the novel intimates, there is strength to be gained from discussing it.
“I love messy characters who are not walking in a straight line, just making questionable decisions,” Rivera admits. In Samara, she wanted to create someone in deep denial, a person who believes that if she can fit in and function, all the trauma will disappear.
“It’s the superficiality of, If I look good, then it’s all good,” she explains.
Rivera recollects the Bronx during the early days of hip-hop. “All the kids were fabulously dressed,” she says, “even if they didn’t have money.” This taught her that “what you wear is your armor” and that the right clothes can allow you to present yourself “even if you know you don’t belong in the room.”
As an example, she recalls interviewing for an assistant job at a fashion magazine with a young white woman who dismissed her after looking at her shoes. Samara, too, experiences this type of gatekeeping; to deal with it, she code shifts, using a “white voice” at work and stronger, guttural tones with family. Rivera drew on her own speech patterns to create that aspect of the character, acknowledging that when she’s uncomfortable, her voice gets very high.
While her young adult books have featured speculative and folkloric elements, Rivera began writing horror more directly during the pandemic, after reading Victor LaValle and Latin American and Mexican authors including Fernanda Melchor and Mariana Enríquez. The latter writing, she enthuses, was “dark, dark, dark, unafraid and raw”—especially that of the women. And then, of course, there’s Vernon, the reality of which (pigs and slaughterhouses) was a direct influence.
Tiny Threads doesn’t shy away from darkness. Rivera struggled with nightmares and somniloquy while writing, but she continued to push through because she sensed she was working something out. Reality itself can be horrifying, Rivera suggests, recounting a Puerto Rican folktale about a boogeyman who rides a bike and takes people. “Later on, I realized that it was actually a true story about a guy riding around on a bike. The horror—the reality—the horror,” she says, holding out her hands, balancing them, as she does so skillfully in this scary and engrossing book.•
Anita Felicelli is Alta Journal ’s books editor and the author of How We Know Our Time Travelers, Chimerica, and Love Songs for a Lost Continent.
