Ultranatural

by Candice Wuehle

Before Love became a household name, she was Lacey Dove Bart, a determined teen with dreams of stardom. Desperate to escape her bleak small-town life, Lacey dazzles at an audition for the prestigious Newland Academy, catching the eye of mega producer Jimmy Coins. Lacey’s friend and coperformer, Carrie-Anne, believes they’re on the brink of achieving their shared dream of escaping Appalachia. But a betrayal by Lacey leaves them both reeling.

As Lacey is transformed into “Love,” the carefully controlled idol of a generation, she loses piece after piece of herself. She’s contracted for stints on Christian variety shows, toured through malls and state fairs, and even locked in a fortress-like mansion between recording sessions. With her life spiraling out of control and younger, hungrier replacements waiting in the wings, Love’s only chance at freedom is to reconnect with Carrie-Anne and seek redemption in the one authentic bond she has left. Part pop elegy, part horror story, part radical reimagining of female celebrity, Ultranatural autotunes the static of fame until it sounds like prophecy.

412 pages, Paperback

Expected publication April 14, 2026

About the author

Candice Wuehle is the author of the novel MONARCH (Soft Skull, forthcoming) as well as three collections of poetry, including FIDELITORIA: fixed or fluxed (11:11, 2021), BOUND (Inside the Castle Press, 2018) and Death Industrial Complex (Action Books, 2020), which is currently longlisted for The Believer Magazine Book Award. She is also a co-author of Collected Voices in the Expanded Field (11:11, 2020). Her chapbooks include VIBE CHECK (Garden-door Press, 2018), EARTH* AIR* FIRE* WATER *ÆTHER (Grey Books Press, 2015) and cursewords: a guide in 19 steps for aspiring transmographs (Dancing Girl Press, 2014). Her work can be found in The Iowa Review, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Black Warrior Review, Tarpaulin Sky, The Volta, The Colorado Review, SPORK, and The New Orleans Review.
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Candice holds an MA in literature from the University of Minnesota as well as an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She earned a doctorate in Creative Writing at The University of Kansas, where she was the recipient of a Chancellor's Fellowship. Her studies focus on the relationship between trauma, memory, and the occult. She is represented by Kiele Raymond at Thompson Literary Agency.
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Originally from Iowa City, Iowa, Candice lives in Lawrence, Kansas with her husband Andrew and their rabbit, William the Bunny.

Reviews

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

ARC for review. To be published April 14, 2026.

4 stars

Teenagers and best friends Lacey Dove Bart and Carrie-Anne live in poverty in small town Ohio. They are convinced their only way out are scholarships to an arts academy in Virginia. They practice their asses off with no help from anyone and they make it. It seems like their dreams are coming true but it’s not enough for Lacey who needs more now and she turns her back on the academy and Carrie-Anne.

Lacey becomes a big star, huge. Carrie-Anne forges her own career. The women stay in touch sporadically, it’s Lacey’s only real relationship and one she tries to call on when her life falls apart and turns into a horror story.

I really liked this book until its very disconcerting ending which stayed with me; I could not stop thinking about it. The juxtaposition of the lives of the women is well done. Lacey is a little Mariah, a little Britney. That end, though.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Britney-coded pop star breaks out of small-town Ohio, except the real love story isn’t with a guy or even with the audience, but rather an unbreakable bond with her vaguely witchy, ride-or-die best friend. That’s the engine here, and it’s a good one.

I found Ultranatural most effective in its opening third. The girls’ adolescence is rendered in this authentically scuzzy, fluoro-lit way that reminded me of early Lindsay Hunter. Wuehle convincingly portrays Lacey and Carrie-Anne as hungry teens who mythologise escape and believe in their own magic. Then Lacey transforms into Love, and the plot pivots to full-on pop-industrial-complex nightmare: the mercenary dad, the cold-blooded mega-producer, the gilded-cage mansion, etc. Conceptually I love this stuff. The horror of female celebrity is a rich seam (this would be interesting to read alongside Philippa Snow’s essay collection It’s Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me, and fiction-wise, I’ve got my eye on Anna Dorn’s American Spirits next). But at the same time, I struggle with fictional depictions of fame, maybe because I feel the truth of it is so often both stranger and more banal than fiction. Still, if aspects of Love’s rise-and-fall trajectory seem slightly predictable, I obviously realise that’s because the story reflects a reality that often is depressingly predictable.

What keeps the novel afloat is that central friendship. Carrie-Anne is an unexpected yet plausible foil for Lacey/Love. The thread of their connection keeps Love’s fate from feeling too nihilistic in its message, even as it descends ever more into true bleakness (there is, eventually, genuine body horror in her commodification). At the end I’m still thinking about those girls practising dance moves in the snake-infested ruin of an asylum and glimpsing UFOs through the trees, scenes Wuehle shows to be infinitely more romantic than any facet of fame.

I received an advance review copy of Ultranatural from the publisher through NetGalley.

[Dana · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most American mythos is what we might call The Tale of Britney; a beautiful, charismatic young woman comes from nowhere to conquer the public imagination as America’s Sweetheart, before losing it all again and again in front of our eyes over the next decades. In her incredibly timely second novel Ultranatural, Candace Wuehle takes this American myth and reinvents it - not totally unlike the recent trend of novels reinventing ancient mythology - from the inside. Lacey Dove Bart is born in rural Appalachian Ohio, an upbringing that has one positive: her best friend Carrie-Anne, with whom Lacey does everything, including writing songs as a duo that eventually get them accepted to a prestigious performing arts academy and out of Ohio for good. But Lacey quickly tires of being the poor girl at school, and ends up leaving the academy and Carrie-Anne to star in Billy Bunny, a Christian variety show; from there, Lacey is paraded in front of endless lines of powerful old men and eventually starts a pop career as the mononymous Love.

The book spans eleven years - from Lacey at the age of 15 to Love at 26 - though time is elastic in the book, as Wuehle elongates the seemingly endless days of teen longing, and races through the blur of stardom and wealth. When Lacey undergoes a traumatic incident soon before she leaves home, she wonders about the perpetrator: "I wondered which one of us they would have put in the Lunatic Home thirty years ago: him or me." This is the question of the novel - the men around Lacey and particularly Love act with impunity over her life, image and body, but Love is the one who is punished, eventually a captive in her own home with a face she does not recognize.

Ultranatural is almost supernaturally of the current moment; it's hard to read scenes like Love paraded around as a teen on TV in short shorts while men debate how much of her ass is appropriate to see without thinking of the Epstein revelations, and millennial women's painful reckoning with how they were sexualized as young girls without their consent. Some of the details are blunt - Love's most popular single is called I Got It (U Take It) - but barely exaggerated. But the real heart of the book is the relationship between Lacey and Carrie-Anne, which takes place through texts, emails, and psychic communications. It really makes you wish Britney had a secret best friend keeping her alive.

Thanks to University of Iowa Press and NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

[OutlawPoet · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am not even sure what I think of this one.

It starts feeling very coming-of-age and it ends with What. The. Hell.

It's Daisy Jones meets Marilyn Monroe and Anna Nicole Smith.

It's all the things women and girls do to try desperately to fit into what someone else says they need to be - only to discover that those people trying to change and mold her only really want to use her.

It's about trying so hard to be 'not like other girls' that you lose what actually makes you authentic and unique.

I eventually enjoyed this very much, but it left me feeling very sad.

* ARC via Publisher

[Allie Rowbottom · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this novel. A poetic yet feral ode to girlhood, witchcraft, pop stardom, art as a devotional practice and what happens when one's creative fire become objectified, commodified, all topics too often framed as frivolous, simply because they pertain to women. Wuehle's refusal to write her characters with anything less than utter seriousness they deserve makes ULTRANATURAL a radical act.