Review: Coming undone in 'Tiny Threads'

Tanya Shirazi Galvez / InReview

“The night has formed a figure.” Lilliam Rivera’s “Tiny Threads” delivers a haunting — but shows us we should fear those that still bleed and have beating hearts. This is an ambitious adult debut from the award-winning young-adult and middle-grade author. Her newest work is a slow simmer that comes to a boil, as it grapples with how the psychological and the supernatural can meet.

This story is filled with ghosts and monsters, but “Tiny Threads” also explores and depicts headfirst the exploitation of workers in Los Angeles, the horrors of gentrification and violence against women.

Freelance fashion journalist Samara moves to southern California after she lands her dream job working under powerhouse designer Antonio Mota. Samara hails from New Jersey and settles in the city of Vernon, a few miles south of Downtown L.A.

Samara, like many transplants, has lofty ambitions to establish herself within the industry, but soon, she realizes that not only does her success hinge on executing a phenomenal fashion show that must catapult her dimming boss back into stardom, but she must also mind his ego, coddling an eccentric and cruel man who will do anything for relevance.

The pressures of her demanding job, and the secrets she left back home, cause her to struggle with sleepless nights in her new studio. She is tormented by nightmares and hallucinations that start in the evening but then eventually manifest themselves shamelessly in broad daylight.

She hears noises that sound like rats within her apartment walls, wailing women outside her window, ominous disfigured female shapes on the streets; Samara is being psychically attacked. To drown her repressed memories and present-day hauntings, she drinks — at first only to sleep, but then slowly drinking takes over her life as much as her demons.

As Samara questions her sanity and struggles to find her bearings in a new city, she learns about the dark history of Vernon, and the fashion empire Mota built that keeps its affairs private and unspeakable. The haunted Samara realizes she is but one of many women enduring horrors in this city. There are souls reaching out to her from beyond the grave, pushing her towards revelations that may also force her to reckon with her own demons.

Lilliam Rivera painstakingly shows how exploitative the fashion industry is. When Samara is first introduced to Mota’s team, she is surprised that everyone eats together, and how the collegial relationships are reframed as being part of a “family.”

But family can be the first place where one witnesses injustices, imbalance of power dynamics and abuse. And it is here where one first is forced to hold silences — for the sake of those in power and at the expense of the most vulnerable. Rivera crafts a dark comparison, indeed.

There’s so much to love about this page-turner, but what I appreciate so much is how the city of Vernon is so central to the work. Though Vernon has a population of only 250 residents, according to the city website, it is “home to industries including food and agricultural, steel, plastics, logistics, and home furnishing” — these buildings rattle too empty at night.

Rivera captures this emptiness perfectly, painting a picture of streets not suitable for pedestrians and only for trucks. If one were to run screaming down these roads, would the sound just echo through desolate factories to no avail?

“Tiny Threads” is a modern-day Gothic horror. There’s a quiet undercurrent of melancholia and nostalgia throughout the work that is palatable, and isolation, when encountering a preoccupied person, can unquiet and unravel the mind.

Rivera masterfully renders how easy it is to be haunted, when we are removed from our loved ones and the schemas we recognize intimately. She deftly depicts how a new place, foreign and unintelligible, can leave us vulnerable to the greatest danger of all — the obsessive mind.

Tanya Shirazi Galvez is a Los Angeles-born, Las Vegas-based writer. She studied at the University of Pittsburgh and is currently at work on her first novel.