In 'Tiny Threads', Lilliam Rivera addresses the brutality of capitalism

Last year, when I was looking for a Mini Cooper, I headed to Mini of Downtown Los Angeles, figuring it would be 15 or 20 minutes from my home in Silver Lake. Forty-five minutes later, I passed a sign that read, “City of Vernon, California. Exclusively Industrial. Founded 1905.” Five minutes later, I arrived at the dealership and asked why its name included DTLA, when it was clearly in Vernon. “Because no one had ever heard of Vernon,” the salesman told me.

Soon more people will have heard of Vernon, thanks to the wildly imaginative new novel by Lilliam Rivera, former entertainment editor of Latina magazine and author of seven books for children and young adults. In her first novel for adults, “Tiny Threads,” the town of Vernon is as much a protagonist as its human (and ghostly) characters. Not the Vernon of car dealerships with misleading names, 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 profit-driven mass production (specifically, of meat and fashion) and the brutality of misogyny.

“Although the Vernon I write about in this book is purely fictional,” Rivera writes, “factories have been poisoning brown communities for decades while powerful men believe their sexual predations are a right.”

In real life, the Farmer John's slaughterhouse, covered in murals Artwork depicting pink pigs frolicking on bright green farmland stank up Vernon’s air for nearly a century, until it closed in 2023 citing high operating costs in California. In Rivera’s Vernon, Farmer John’s stand-in is Consuelo’s Farmhouse and its neighbor is the fictional House of Mota, headquarters of once-legendary, now-failed fashion designer Antonio Mota. Attracted by the industrial town’s cheap rents and certain that Vernon is on the verge of gentrification, the famously angry Mota is desperate to rescue his company from obsolescence. He plans a runway show of new designs and lures ambitious young fashion journalist Samara from the East Coast to promote it.

Excited to move to “downtown Los Angeles,” Samara shows up to work on her first day congratulating herself on the wisdom of her big move—until she catches a putrid whiff of “Vernon perfume” wafting from the smokestacks of the slaughterhouse next door, and is roundly shunned by her coworkers. Her California dream quickly fading, Samara realizes she’ll have just weeks to conceive and execute a fashion show concept, secure a location, and hire models and crew.

Samara’s discomfort follows her home. Night after night, she is jolted awake at two in the morning by strange and terrifying apparitions and visions that threaten her sanity and eventually her life. Samara initially tries to keep this information from her unsupportive mother, who has objected to Samara moving to Vernon: “It’s not that I don’t want to worry my mother, I just don’t want her to win.” But, driven to despair by the horror show that replays every night in her head, Samara finally confesses how disturbed she is: “It sounds like someone is crying or moaning… Sometimes it sounds like a creaking sound, like something trying to break free from a trap.”

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

As the voices of ghosts, office politics targeting Samara, and the deadline to complete the collection approach, Samara becomes painfully aware of the gentrification of Vernon and her own role in it. One afternoon on her way home from work, she passes a small local gallery and says to Marisa, the artist and owner, “It must be exciting to see this new development in Vernon.”

“It’s good for some,” Marisa replies as she wraps up the painting that Samara has bought. “The rich trample on those who are from here and pollute our land.”

As Samara loses all sense of balance, a relaxing glass of wine before bed turns into a bottle, then two; a shot of vodka added to her morning coffee becomes a steady stream of liquid courage throughout the day. With the fashion show approaching, pills and cocaine become omnipresent in the House of Mota, supplementing Samara's day-and-night drinking. Samara's disintegration is a case study in the kinds of circumstances that can trigger addiction: a demanding, unreasonable boss; unsympathetic coworkers; nightly torture by ghosts who may or may not carry messages from Vernon and Samara's past; and corrosive secrets that destroy the places and people who hold them.

““Tiny Threads” lives up to its genre. It is a horror novel, its supernatural and real elements intertwined so seamlessly that the reader begins to question reality, as Samara does in a scene near the end of the story, watching a model walk down the runway at the fashion show Samara has worked so hard to organize. “The model has beautiful indigenous features that contrast with her straight, platinum blonde hair. Her mouth is half open and the hard edges of her teeth gleam… Samara stares in horror at the pink color of the model’s wet tongue, licking her mouth before biting a piece of her lower lip to clean it.”

“Tiny Threads” is also a social critique that dissects the fashion and meat industries, racism, the glitz and pain of gentrification, the nightmare of the abusive workplace and the never-ending repercussions of child sexual abuse. As in real life, these issues remain unresolved in the novel. Rivera’s talent is formidable enough to make the book’s big questions as gripping as its horrors.

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