A story of fashion, misery and the brutality of capitalism.

When I was shopping for a Mini Cooper last year, I went to the Mini Downtown Los Angeles and thought I was 15 or 20 minutes from my house. Forty-five minutes later, I passed a sign that said, “City of Vernon, California. Specially Industrial. was founded in 1905.” Five minutes later, I arrived at the dealership and asked why the name included DTLA when it was in Vernon. “Because no one has ever heard of Vernon,” the salesman told me.

Soon more people will be hearing about Vernon, thanks to a zany new novel by Liliam Rivera, the former entertainment editor of Latina magazine and the author of seven books for children and young adults. In her first novel for adults, Little Beard, Vernon City plays both human and ghostly characters. Not the Vernon of the fake car dealerships, mind you, but the Vernon that literally reeks of the crimes of capitalism. In the book’s acknowledgments, Rivera sums up the novel’s twin themes: the brutality of mass production for profit (especially meat and fashion) and the brutality of immorality.

“Although the Vernon I write about in this book is purely fictional,” Rivera writes, “factories have poisoned brown communities for decades, while powerful men believe their sexual pain is justified.”

In real life, Farmer John’s Slaughterhouse: Covered in Murals The image of pink pigs atop bright green fields filled the air of Vernon for nearly a century, until it closed in 2023 due to high operating costs in California. In Vernon on the Rivera, Farmer John’s Station is home to Consuelo’s Farmhouse and its neighbor Mota’s Imaginary House, the once-legendary and now-defunct residence of fashion designer Antonio Mota. Motivated by the industrial town’s cheap rent and convinced that Vernon is on the verge of gentrification, Mota is furious to save his company from obsolescence. He plans a new fashion show and hires Samara, an ambitious young fashion journalist from the East Coast, to promote it.

Excited to move to “downtown Los Angeles,” Samara shows up for her first day of work congratulating herself on the wisdom of her big move—until she smells “Vernon’s perfume” rotting in the chimney of the butcher shop next door, and heads out to be picked up by her colleagues. Her California dream soon to fade, Samara realizes it takes weeks to develop and execute a fashion show concept, secure a location, and cast models and crew.

Samara’s unease follows her home. Night after night, she wakes up at 2 a.m. with strange, terrifying dreams and visions that threaten her sanity and, ultimately, her life. Initially, Samara tries to hide this information from her naive mother, who objects to Samara moving to Vernon: “It’s not that I don’t want to worry my mother, it’s just that I don’t want her to win.” But Samara, disillusioned by the terrifying nighttime spectacle in her head, eventually admits how disturbed she is: “It sounds like someone is crying or moaning… Sometimes it sounds like a hissing sound, like something is trying to escape from a trap.”

“They’re rats,” her mother says. “Are you cleaning the kitchen?”

As ghostly voices, office politics aimed at Samara, and the collection deadline loom, Samara becomes aware of Vernon’s lineage and her own role in it. On her way home from work one afternoon, she stops at a small local gallery and tells Marisa, the artist and owner, “It must be exciting to see this new development in Vernon.”

“For some it is good,” Marisa said as she folded the painting Samara had bought. “The rich are trampling on those who are really from here and polluting our land.”

When Samara loses all sense of balance, a soothing glass of wine before bed turns into a bottle, then two; a drop of sweat added to her morning coffee becomes a steady stream of liquid courage. As the fashion show approaches, drugs and cocaine are everywhere in the Mota household, complementing Samara’s nightly drinking. Samara’s disintegration is a case study in the kinds of situations that can lead to addiction: a demanding, unreasonable boss; extraordinary colleagues; nightly torture by ghosts who may or may not be delivering messages from Vernon and Samara’s past; and the corrosive secrets that destroy the places and people who hold them.

““Small Threads” fits its genre. This is a horror novel, its elements of the supernatural and the real so closely intertwined that the reader questions reality, as Samara does in a scene near the end of the story, watching a model walk the runway at Samara’s fashion show. place. in “The model has beautiful local features that stand out against her straight, white hair. Her mouth is parted, the hard edges of her teeth gleaming… Samara stares in horror at the pink color of the model’s wet tongue, licking her mouth before biting off a chunk of her lower lip she wipes away.”

“Little Beards” is also a social critique, looking at the fashion and meat industries, racism, the glitz and sadness of gentrification, the horrors of an abusive workplace, and the endless consequences of child sexual abuse. As in real life, these questions remain unresolved in the novel. Rivera’s talent is great enough to make the book’s big questions as compelling as its horrors.

Meredith Maran, author of The New Me and other books, lives in Silver Lake.