Follow Me to Ground: Creatures, Cures, and Creepiness

I hate novellas. I very rarely ever feel that this length of book properly tells a story. However, I kept reading fantastic reviews for Follow Me to Ground. Then my favorite blogger, Jenny Lawson aka The Bloggess, chose it for her book club. Lawson finds humor in difficult situations, like her offbeat upbringing and struggle with mental illness, so I figured that any book that she likes would be amazing. I’m not quite loyal enough to buy the book from her bookstore, but I did pick it from the library.

Follow Me to Ground (2018)
Written by: Sue Rainsford
Genre: Magic Realism/Horror
Pages: 197
Publisher: Scribner

The Premise:

In a house in a wood, Ada and her father live peacefully, tending to their garden and the wildlife in it. They are not human though. Ada was made by her father from the Ground, a unique patch of earth with birthing and healing properties. Though perhaps he didn’t get her quite right. They spend their days healing the local human folk — named Cures — who visit them, guardedly, with their ailments.

This is the story of what happens when Ada embarks on a relationship with a local Cure named Samson, and is forced to choose between her old life with her father, and a new one with her human lover. Her decision will uproot the town — and the Ground itself — forever.

A poised and simmering tour-de-force, Follow Me to Ground is a sinister vision of desire and free will, voiced in earthy prose and eviscerating detail by an astoundingly original new writer.

Major spoilers ahead.

Discussion: I found myself wondering if I had read the same book as the people who wrote the rave reviews. Follow Me to Ground is one of those strange, lyrical books that forgets to have a plot. Ada and her father are healers who use magic to open up people and remove sickness. They are something other than human. They age more slowly and live longer; Ada has been a teenager for generations. Father turns into a beast and eats the local wildlife. He assembled Ada from pieces, and she was born from The Ground outside their home. The Ground is dangerous, and yet they also use burial to heal the villagers, whom they call “Cures.” The entire extent of the plot is that Ada starts having sex with one of the villagers, Samson, but her father and Olivia, Samson’s widowed, pregnant sister, disapprove.

This is a book that often made me say, “What the bleep did I just read?” Early in the book, Ada tells us, “First time I tried to lay down with a boy, I didn’t know what I was doing…He went to put it in and there was nowhere for it to go and he got scared and bit me,” and “By the time I took Samson inside, I’d grown myself an opening that I’d a dozen names for” (pg. 12). Yikes. This is no love story. Ada only likes Samson for sex. They barely even have a conversation. Given that this book takes place pre-Internet, I suppose it is difficult to find a dude willing to bang Frankenstein’s monster. I did enjoy that the story seems to take place outside of time and place. It added to the weirdness. Automobiles exist in this story but the Cures seem to live like medieval peasants, working in fields. There are tiny vignettes from the points-of-view of the Cures, but they don’t add much to the story. None of them say, “Hey,  maybe we should start seeing doctors and getting some antibiotics instead of letting the monsters on the edge of town bury us in their yard?”

Follow Me to Ground definitely delivers on the creepiness. Father and Ada are searching for roots in The Ground when she finds “a pile of waste that had no cause to be there. Pale branches, mostly yellow and thin. Or rather, they would have been branches, but their color and shape weren’t right” (pg. 90). Turns out, they’re Ada’s predecessors who didn’t turn out and the branches should have been bones. Given how clueless Ada is, I wondered if Father forgot to give her a brain. Rainsford pretty much smacks you over the head with the fact that Samson got his own sister pregnant but Ada doesn’t figure it out until the last few pages. When she does finally realize the truth, she is totally okay with it. Again, “What the bleep did I just read?”

Rainsford has created an insanely unique premise and exceptionally strange main characters. I wish that she had done something more interesting with the story than “girl’s father disapproves of her boyfriend.” I have a list of unanswered questions almost as long as the book itself. What exactly are Father and Ada? Where did they come from? Why don’t they age? How is The Ground both dangerous and healing? Why do Father and Ada choose to spend their quasi-immortal lives healing villagers? Why is there a man-eating eel named Sister Eel in the local lake? Is Ada’s disturbing lack of morality intrinsic to what she is or is something wrong with her? The entire book is like a weird fever dream. I feel like the book is supposed to be a metaphor but I really can’t tell you what for. Follow Me to Ground would have been a much better book if it had more of a plot.

In conclusion: I hope the fact that I did not enjoy this book at all will not prevent Jenny Lawson from someday becoming my best friend. I do highly recommend her books, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened and Furiously Happy. If you like lyrical writing and gruesome body horror, you might love this book. If you’re annoyed by unanswered questions and lack of an actual plot, you will probably hate it as much as I did.