The Wilds

There are two kinds of fantastic disruption in Julia Elliott's freshman collection of short stories, The Wilds - - in the first, the banal surfaces of everyday life swell and metastasize into strange encounters with the miraculous and possibly terrible; in the second, Elliott pushes and prods a weird but none-too-alien premise to its absurd and often hilarious conclusion. Stories like "Limbs," "Regeneration at Mukti," "The Caveman Diet," and "Love Machine" belong to the latter category. These tales float somewhere between social satire and comedy - - and remind me a lot of George Saunders' early fabulations or more evolved Donald Barthelme confections. To be honest, while entertaining, these are less successful stories. The first category, the eruption of weirdness from within the grain of contemporary American life, is where Elliott really shines. These stories - -like "Rapture," "Feral, " the curiously truncated "Organisms," and the collection's title story - - work because Elliott communicates her sur-reailties in a voice that brings the grotesque poetics of Southern Gothic into contact with a world - - of Facebook, Garfield, and Hobby Lobby franchises - - dedicated to erasing mystery and danger. Wild dogs swarm suburbia in "Feral" and draw the story's narrator into stranger realms of freedom. A mutated bacillus in "Organisms" makes teenage alienation into a real and mysterious epidemic. In "Rapture," a levitating, grotesque, old-timey Baptist grandmother upends an innocent slumber party and offers the narrator a seductive glimpse into worlds beyond the bourgeois comforts of the Dixie City Fashion Mall and Neil Diamond "double shots" on AM radio. "Rapture" is one of the most charming tales in the collection. The other is the title story, "The Wilds," where first love blossoms amidst garden parties, adolescent pustules, and incipient lycanthropy. Elliott's is just the kind imagination that's missing in so much American fiction today - - odd, rich, compelling, fiercely individual and beautiful. Word on the street is that Elliott is preparing her first novel - - and I'm hoping she sticks to the twisted, overgrown, diabolically delicious and dangerously dappled path of stories like "Rapture" and "The Wilds."

I found this book on a "weird" fiction list and decided to pick it up in anticipation of a very long air plane flight. It certainly passed the time. I was impressed by the stories, which have a subtle weirdness to them. There is a great deal of complexity and ambiguity in Julia Elliott's work that leaves you speculating on the characters and the imaginative environments she constructs. The story themes range in content (sci-fi, magical realism and literary fiction with a slightly distorted element). If you are looking for straight up genre fiction (horror, "hard" sci-fi or fantasy), I imagine you will be let down by this collection. However, Elliott's work is most entertaining in the ways it defies genre conventions and plays with them (although not all the stories in this volume are successful at this, and getting through the first story "Rapture" took some patience). For those who like literary fiction that is slightly left-of-center, you will probably find these stories entertaining.

I’m going to rip off something from Matt Bell’s Facebook page for my review of The Wilds By Julia Elliot: “It's easier for people to let go if the world is strange. In a realist story, it sometimes feels like you're reading someone else's story. In a certain kind of non-realist story, the slight unfamiliarity of events unfolding in a familiar setting can let you inhabit a story, can make you feel like its happening to you.” The quote is from a talk writer Diane Cook gave to Bell’s undergrad workshop at ASU, and I thought is was a fitting way to describe Elliot’s excellent debut collection of weird stories. The stories in The Wilds all take place in utterly familiar environments: Suburban neighborhoods, a convalescent home, the neighborhood bar, the local high school. The settings are benign and nothing more than static in our day-to-day world, and each of these settings would make for ideal canvass’ for a contemporary writer to tell equally benign tales of lost love and broken ambitions. But what Elliot does is twist these settings and injects them with a healthy dose of the weird, and turns them into something magical and akin to an adult fairy tale. The suburban neighborhood becomes overrun with wild dogs, broken entirely free from their bonds with humanity; the convalescent home becomes a laboratory where geneticists and robotics experts restore the memories and bodies of the old; the neighborhood bar becomes a place where frightened adults gather to gossip about the plague sweeping the country where teenagers become addicted to electronic devices and junk food and then fall into a mysterious coma, only to suddenly awaken and disappear. The minute strangeness of these stories allows the reader to become truly lost in these odd worlds, and you can’t help but feel for the too brief of time you’re inhabiting them that this is actually the world we live in, where the impossible simply walks alongside us and we think of it as nothing more than common place. Elliot’s prose is elegant and poetic, and her imagination seems boundless. I try to avoid using words like ‘perfect’ or ‘masterpiece’, but it’s nearly impossible for me to not use them when describing The Wilds, because each story is a miniature masterpiece, and the collection is just about as perfect a short story collection as I’ve run into in years.

The cover is beautiful. The author was a high school friend of mine so I find her stories difficult to read because I just hear her voice and see the inspiration for the ideas too well for comfort.

Weirdly wonderful, and intense. The author uses an unusual style, while the stories themselves are captivating. I’ve pre-ordered her next book, coming out in 2025, I believe.

Ich tue mich schwer damit, die Faszination, die die Stories auf mich ausüben, genau begründen zu können. Zunächst ist zu sagen, dass Julia Elliott rein sprachlich schon eine großartige Erzählerin ist, wortgewaltig, witzig, verstörend, mit einem einzigartigen Tonfall - alles, was man von Erzählern erwartet und doch so selten geboten bekommt. Ihre Texte sind funkelnde Kristalle, die aus verschiedenen Winkeln betrachtet in allen Farben des Spektrums blitzen. Vielseitig und vielschichtig, erzeugen sie eine intensive Spannung beim Lesen, eine Faszination, der ich mich nicht entziehen kann. Bei einem solchen Erzählungsband läßt sich nicht in wenigen Worten sagen, worum es im Kern geht. Es scheint mir vor allem um die Entfremdung des Menschen zu sich selbst, zu seinesgleichen und zur Natur zu gehen. Darum, wie dünn die feine Membran der Kultur ist, die uns von unserer animalischen Herkunft und unserer Umwelt trennt, darum, wie schnell Risse entstehen, die uns wieder "verwildern" lassen. Erotik und Tod einerseits, Bio-Kost, fortgeschrittene Medizin und Selbsterfahrungskurse andererseits: die Texte bewegen sich im Spannungsgeflecht widersprüchlicher Daseinsbedingungen, man mag sie als Southern Gothic, Magischen Realismus, surreale Feen-Märchen oder auch anders bezeichnen. Ihre Stärke, egal wie man die Stories genretechnisch eintüten möchte, besteht in der Spannung zwischen der lupenreinen, exakten, zugleich kühlen und sinnlichen Sprache und den Abgründen, die sich unter der schillernden Oberfläche verbergen. Form und Inhalt passen perfekt zueinander, und wahrscheinlich ist genau das der Grund, warum dieses Buch so großartig ist.