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Sent to the Silkworn House
Gwen Hilton gives you everything you could ask for from a literary debut. Her voice shakes in a dynamic tenor, awash in 21st century zeitgeist while recalling the commanding style of the canonical greats. Sent to the Silkworm House rattles you with cunning mnemonic triggers, crystallizing and festering like a stagnant wound or scabbing off abruptly, leaving you mesmerized by the scaffolding of skittering narrative as the speaker chafes at linearity, revolts against hermeneutics. With a startling confidence that announces innovation, Hilton’s compass is physical, violently magnetizing inward, pulling from the reservoir of collective and private memories like capturing a generation on its last straw. Chasing serenity, confronting trauma through visceral sensation and wasted lives with the grace of ambiguity, old enough to know better but young enough to still feel the silver barrel pointed at disposable youth. Sent to the Silkworm House engrosses without revealing its motives. It is metaphysical surgery, a book charged with eternal priorities, unsafe for the spiritually unconfirmed. It draws a sinuous swath through materialist human resource-culling antisocial industrial death and painfully orchestral sorrow and sociocultural idealism. Step out of the way or get flattened. The limits of the written word as instrument to confound are corkscrewing you from end to end, the pages are radically dense and dimensional, and there’s no way out but through.
130 pages, Paperback
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
September 18, 2022
To call a literary environment “evil” is perhaps to engage in naive, milquetoast moralizing that would betray the reader responding to said environment as a sheltered, wide-eyed tourist who wandered into the wrong neighborhood, the dark side. Having said that, I feel mugged by the writers in the stable of Expat Press based out of New York City. Others will have to write (or have written) about the history of the press, its iconoclastic editor Manuel Marrero, and the peculiar angle it takes on writing in these years when the 21st century is apparently kicking into apocalyptic high gear. Why do I say mugged? Because during the handful of times I have read an Expat production, I feel like somebody pops out a concealed edged weapon and starts slashing at my face, at my eyes, as if to carefully ensure that this will be the last thing I ever read. These books victimize you. The books take positions and execute maneuvers that are to the reader — this reader at least — like the threatening gestures, signs, vocalizations of the cobra about to strike.
Maybe I’m overstating it. But I’ve been reading a lot of menacing things from menacing directions lately, and Expat has a unique flavor of menace all its own. The most recent example of this is Sent to the Silkworm House by Gwen Hilton. It’s a very short, segmented book, a novella really, that quickly gets under your skin. The aspect of this book that sticks out to me most is the truly fresh voice that Hilton uses to embody her first-person POVs. The plural form is misleading, because they all are probably meant to be the same person, although there is in each segment a trajectory of personality, a line that must be cohered in the mind of the reader with all the others. All together it’s a prickly, loose collection of sharp steel rods that is a bit awkward to carry from place to place but the aesthetic effect is fitting and the duration of the trip isn’t long.
The real finer point, that I will try to make without sounding like an effete art school peckerhead extolling craft, is that what makes Hilton’s sentences unique is the space between them, the mental jumps from one clipped sentence to the next that are in no way obvious. This is part of writing too: Hilton’s narration is downloaded in an impressionistic way that depends on how each sentence passes off a clash of mental energy to the one following. Each thought is presented as part of a multifaceted mosaic of contrasting colors and textures that I haven’t seen other writers pulling off.
There are thousands of good examples here of this voice, see for yourself. Each paragraph is a glittering example, but to show you what I mean, witness the narrator talking about her proposal to her fiancée:
“The ring was never really mine. Her mom said if I wanted to propose then I should propose now. I proposed on the Winter Solstice and had a Kardashian-level instant regret. … The insurer values the ring at about fifteen thousand dollars. I spent my life savings to pay for labor. Parts were provided by her family. She doesn’t wear the ring out or to classes because she thinks she will get attacked for it.”
From what I can tell, the “story” of the novella concerns the adventures of a bisexual trans woman living in Chicago, although that rather stale identity encapsulation seems too fixed for the fluid reality of the narrator or narrators. The “I” of the collected segments records her variously embodied relationships, traumatizing memories, work experiences, etc. I haven’t read a lot of autofiction and I feel like that term describes a certain kind of lumbering beast other people have seen on other safaris throughout contemporary literature which I have chosen not to go on myself. But if this is autofiction, sign me up for the next flight to darkest Africa. It’s good. It’s really good.
Many of the interactions between characters — were they based on real humans? can these people be anything other than real, 3D people with well-mapped out relationships? — are of a transactional nature. The narrator negotiates with everybody in Chicagoland from a stance of polished worldliness and confidence that throws the reader off but seems entirely credible in Hilton’s hands. She never once bats an eye or lets anyone see her sweat during meetings with high-powered, nervous professionals who seek her services as a “reputation manager”: a consultant who can get ugly, embarrassing photos and stories off the first two or three pages of Google searches should anybody look you up. The narrator talks over sexual arrangements during a date with a jet-setting, ink-festooned girlfriend known as “the Inventor” because she holds several patents; by the way, the world of the novella seems to be dripping with the trappings of money, which I enjoy reading about because I have none and there is a voyeuristic thrill at watching how the upper crust get down. It is with a professional tone that talks with the Inventor proceed, a detachment that is as lived-in and familiar as an old leather office chair, and at no point is the contractual debate over the coming sexual activity really jarring, until it gets hilariously out of control.
Why did I find the merciless, horrifying situations in Sent to the Silkworm House to be hilarious? Am I as sick as the people lurking in the shadowy neighborhood around Expat Press? Maybe I am not such a vanilla square from the sticks. I can’t help that the blackly humorous episodes elicited helpless laughter from me, I can only be thankful because it so rarely happens when I’m reading a book. It’s possible it wasn’t meant to be funny. As the one doing the laughing you just have to let it go, and I hope people buy this book and test their own senses of humor on its edges. Just don’t ask later how came the blood.
Maybe I’m overstating it. But I’ve been reading a lot of menacing things from menacing directions lately, and Expat has a unique flavor of menace all its own. The most recent example of this is Sent to the Silkworm House by Gwen Hilton. It’s a very short, segmented book, a novella really, that quickly gets under your skin. The aspect of this book that sticks out to me most is the truly fresh voice that Hilton uses to embody her first-person POVs. The plural form is misleading, because they all are probably meant to be the same person, although there is in each segment a trajectory of personality, a line that must be cohered in the mind of the reader with all the others. All together it’s a prickly, loose collection of sharp steel rods that is a bit awkward to carry from place to place but the aesthetic effect is fitting and the duration of the trip isn’t long.
The real finer point, that I will try to make without sounding like an effete art school peckerhead extolling craft, is that what makes Hilton’s sentences unique is the space between them, the mental jumps from one clipped sentence to the next that are in no way obvious. This is part of writing too: Hilton’s narration is downloaded in an impressionistic way that depends on how each sentence passes off a clash of mental energy to the one following. Each thought is presented as part of a multifaceted mosaic of contrasting colors and textures that I haven’t seen other writers pulling off.
There are thousands of good examples here of this voice, see for yourself. Each paragraph is a glittering example, but to show you what I mean, witness the narrator talking about her proposal to her fiancée:
“The ring was never really mine. Her mom said if I wanted to propose then I should propose now. I proposed on the Winter Solstice and had a Kardashian-level instant regret. … The insurer values the ring at about fifteen thousand dollars. I spent my life savings to pay for labor. Parts were provided by her family. She doesn’t wear the ring out or to classes because she thinks she will get attacked for it.”
From what I can tell, the “story” of the novella concerns the adventures of a bisexual trans woman living in Chicago, although that rather stale identity encapsulation seems too fixed for the fluid reality of the narrator or narrators. The “I” of the collected segments records her variously embodied relationships, traumatizing memories, work experiences, etc. I haven’t read a lot of autofiction and I feel like that term describes a certain kind of lumbering beast other people have seen on other safaris throughout contemporary literature which I have chosen not to go on myself. But if this is autofiction, sign me up for the next flight to darkest Africa. It’s good. It’s really good.
Many of the interactions between characters — were they based on real humans? can these people be anything other than real, 3D people with well-mapped out relationships? — are of a transactional nature. The narrator negotiates with everybody in Chicagoland from a stance of polished worldliness and confidence that throws the reader off but seems entirely credible in Hilton’s hands. She never once bats an eye or lets anyone see her sweat during meetings with high-powered, nervous professionals who seek her services as a “reputation manager”: a consultant who can get ugly, embarrassing photos and stories off the first two or three pages of Google searches should anybody look you up. The narrator talks over sexual arrangements during a date with a jet-setting, ink-festooned girlfriend known as “the Inventor” because she holds several patents; by the way, the world of the novella seems to be dripping with the trappings of money, which I enjoy reading about because I have none and there is a voyeuristic thrill at watching how the upper crust get down. It is with a professional tone that talks with the Inventor proceed, a detachment that is as lived-in and familiar as an old leather office chair, and at no point is the contractual debate over the coming sexual activity really jarring, until it gets hilariously out of control.
Why did I find the merciless, horrifying situations in Sent to the Silkworm House to be hilarious? Am I as sick as the people lurking in the shadowy neighborhood around Expat Press? Maybe I am not such a vanilla square from the sticks. I can’t help that the blackly humorous episodes elicited helpless laughter from me, I can only be thankful because it so rarely happens when I’m reading a book. It’s possible it wasn’t meant to be funny. As the one doing the laughing you just have to let it go, and I hope people buy this book and test their own senses of humor on its edges. Just don’t ask later how came the blood.
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February 17, 2023Loved this book. It was the author's first and I was impressed with the authority of her voice for being a first-time author. Here Hilton uses the written word as it was intended to be used: as a weapon for inflicting merciless pain on the subjects of long-held grudges. Bravo. Anyway, I would never say anything bad about this book as I get the impression the author knows how to do things with computers that would ultimately destroy me. I fear your entire generation.
October 12, 2022
Reading contemporary fiction, it’s hard not to feel like we’re all late to the party. Everything worth writing has been written, all is vanity, and there’s nothing new under the sun. Amen. But occasionally someone punches through. Gwen Hilton punches through. Sent to the Silkworm House is an open wound. This is the cutting edge.
October 14, 2022
Giger said he painted his dreams. He never sketched a painting, just started with an airbrush in a corner and a nightmare bloomed. This novel reads with that kind of confidence and mastery. The language is effortless and intense.
October 13, 2022
I think Gwen Hilton is onto something. Easily my favorite book of 2022. Really spoke to me.
January 5, 2023
A masterwork of pure visceral and intense beauty, a collage of memory, of inner violence, of the constancy of time lurching on and the events that pinpoint each moment that one exists within. Gwen Hilton has crafted a piece of literature that is truly singular, a gripping novel that deals out in equal parts a palpably midwestern journey through life, and a meditative exegesis of the human condition, including all the love and hate that forms its definition. Some of my favorite sections included the heartfelt passage about John Hinckley Jr., the thrilling and tension-filled journey with Gwen to a coffeeshop to annihilate the presence of a pest once and for all, and the illuminating moments in which the inhumane callousness and the corporate unreality of elite scum are revealed through their own telling dialogue. Truly excellent.
February 28, 2023
I swear, every time I read a book from Expat Press, I feel like such a babe in the woods. I mean, don't get me wrong. I had my share of ill-advised fun in my teens and twenties. Some pretty dirtbag years, if I'm being completely honest. But nothing that makes me feel like I could hang with the likes of Gwen Hilton, whose loosely connected stories and gender-amorphous autofictions (I think) comprise the at times nihilistic, at times hilarious, (perhaps even deserving of their own new descriptor: nihilarious?) collection Sent to the Silkworm House. These mad, amoral tales of debauched derring-do - scribbled out in a percussively pithy, ruthlessly exacting style that screams and squelches and cackles right off the page - announce a brave, brazen new voice of a generation; one quite literally raised by TV, just well enough to fake its way into the college of the internets, where it learned just enough to make ends meet while its predecessors burn the world down.
Almost by way of a disclaimer, Hilton makes note right off the bat of the inherent faultiness of memory before launching into a kind of spliced-and-diced highlight reel of formative scenes from a youth that will feel familiar to most anyone who grew up middle-class-adjacent on the cusp of the 20th and 21st centuries; unsupervised afternoons of illicit video gaming and hard-R movies viewed entirely too young, intermixed with vaguely erotic adolescent bullying (both inflicted and endured), and moments of sudden, horrific violence that shattered the idyllic facade of her Anytown, USA bedroom community. Reminiscent of both the word-of-mouth suburban mythmaking that gave Kevin Smith's early films their dialogic cred, and the neglected underbelly of American childhood exposed via the best work of Harmony Korine and Larry Clark, Hilton (who is, by her own admission, a hopelessly romantical movie lover) here with these early chapters, stakes her claim amid that provocateurial tradition.
After a hard-compacted diamond of a story about working a scam selling exercise equipment (I mention it only because it was one of my favorites) the book's exposed midriff wriggles through an exhibitionist hodgepodge of sexual fantasies and outre encounters, including (but not limited to) a no-holds-barred teenage porn binge, a confessional outpouring of lust for John Hinckley Jr., the revelation of a tramp stamp reading "Butt Slut," and a terrifying evening spent with a potentially sociopathic older woman which, while I won't give away details here, I will say features viscerally depicted acts of both sex and violence that made me physically squirm in my seat. Hilton, who is trans, but has stated in interviews that she did not set out to speak to the trans experience or write from a specifically trans perspective, leaves virtually all sexual politics scrabbling madly outside the deadbolted bedroom door - largely separated from the more gut-level sensations in which her work is human-trafficking. And though any reader will see obvious rights and wrongs being perpetrated throughout these stories, Hilton's chief talking points seem to be more in line with "this shit happens all the time" and "people get away with this every day."
These upsettingly titillating (or titillatingly upsetting?) divulgences dovetail directly into the book's latter third, which revolves around the (nebulously semiautobiographical? maybe?) protagonist's work as an online reputation management specialist - a kind of cybersecurity mercenary for people who don't want their dirty laundry to be their defining internet search result. Armed with Keitel-esque Wolf's teeth cut on law firm grunt work and a sense of self-preservation that borders on the Machiavellian, Hilton offers us an insider's insight into the down-and-dirty operations of a Fixer-for-hire ("You can hide a dead body on page 2 of Google" she repeatedly tells her clients), bringing the unsavory practices one might associate with Otto Maddox or Jimmy McGill into the age of cancel culture and #MeToo. In many ways, this job feels like the direct result of all that came before it - the distilled, weaponized, monetized repurposing of a lifetime's worth of ugly truths well-learned; the gig economy of trauma.
In closing, Sent to the Silkworm House is not for the faint of heart (it's my fourth Expat title, and so far, they're batting 1,000 on that front), but if you've read this far and it sounds like your preferred brand of perversely wild ride, then it is without question the real deal. Transgressive fiction grows on trees these days - especially for those plugged into the small press community - and it's not always easy to know what just might rise above the fray and knock your fuckin' socks off, but Gwen Hilton absolutely will. Even with my own tragicomic grotesque of bad sex, lame drugs, and pop culture annihilation set for publication next month, I still don't know if I could hang with her, but if the tastes expressed in Sent to the Silkworm House are any indication (Lou Reed and Metallica's Lulu IS a misunderstood masterpiece! Bronson is NWR's BEST film!) I'd jump at the chance. She writes with the purity of vision of someone who's seen it all, the inspired fury of someone who's got a Hell of a lot to say about it, and the anarchic empathy of someone who's always on the hunt for more. Here's hoping that means more stories like these in the very near future.
Almost by way of a disclaimer, Hilton makes note right off the bat of the inherent faultiness of memory before launching into a kind of spliced-and-diced highlight reel of formative scenes from a youth that will feel familiar to most anyone who grew up middle-class-adjacent on the cusp of the 20th and 21st centuries; unsupervised afternoons of illicit video gaming and hard-R movies viewed entirely too young, intermixed with vaguely erotic adolescent bullying (both inflicted and endured), and moments of sudden, horrific violence that shattered the idyllic facade of her Anytown, USA bedroom community. Reminiscent of both the word-of-mouth suburban mythmaking that gave Kevin Smith's early films their dialogic cred, and the neglected underbelly of American childhood exposed via the best work of Harmony Korine and Larry Clark, Hilton (who is, by her own admission, a hopelessly romantical movie lover) here with these early chapters, stakes her claim amid that provocateurial tradition.
After a hard-compacted diamond of a story about working a scam selling exercise equipment (I mention it only because it was one of my favorites) the book's exposed midriff wriggles through an exhibitionist hodgepodge of sexual fantasies and outre encounters, including (but not limited to) a no-holds-barred teenage porn binge, a confessional outpouring of lust for John Hinckley Jr., the revelation of a tramp stamp reading "Butt Slut," and a terrifying evening spent with a potentially sociopathic older woman which, while I won't give away details here, I will say features viscerally depicted acts of both sex and violence that made me physically squirm in my seat. Hilton, who is trans, but has stated in interviews that she did not set out to speak to the trans experience or write from a specifically trans perspective, leaves virtually all sexual politics scrabbling madly outside the deadbolted bedroom door - largely separated from the more gut-level sensations in which her work is human-trafficking. And though any reader will see obvious rights and wrongs being perpetrated throughout these stories, Hilton's chief talking points seem to be more in line with "this shit happens all the time" and "people get away with this every day."
These upsettingly titillating (or titillatingly upsetting?) divulgences dovetail directly into the book's latter third, which revolves around the (nebulously semiautobiographical? maybe?) protagonist's work as an online reputation management specialist - a kind of cybersecurity mercenary for people who don't want their dirty laundry to be their defining internet search result. Armed with Keitel-esque Wolf's teeth cut on law firm grunt work and a sense of self-preservation that borders on the Machiavellian, Hilton offers us an insider's insight into the down-and-dirty operations of a Fixer-for-hire ("You can hide a dead body on page 2 of Google" she repeatedly tells her clients), bringing the unsavory practices one might associate with Otto Maddox or Jimmy McGill into the age of cancel culture and #MeToo. In many ways, this job feels like the direct result of all that came before it - the distilled, weaponized, monetized repurposing of a lifetime's worth of ugly truths well-learned; the gig economy of trauma.
In closing, Sent to the Silkworm House is not for the faint of heart (it's my fourth Expat title, and so far, they're batting 1,000 on that front), but if you've read this far and it sounds like your preferred brand of perversely wild ride, then it is without question the real deal. Transgressive fiction grows on trees these days - especially for those plugged into the small press community - and it's not always easy to know what just might rise above the fray and knock your fuckin' socks off, but Gwen Hilton absolutely will. Even with my own tragicomic grotesque of bad sex, lame drugs, and pop culture annihilation set for publication next month, I still don't know if I could hang with her, but if the tastes expressed in Sent to the Silkworm House are any indication (Lou Reed and Metallica's Lulu IS a misunderstood masterpiece! Bronson is NWR's BEST film!) I'd jump at the chance. She writes with the purity of vision of someone who's seen it all, the inspired fury of someone who's got a Hell of a lot to say about it, and the anarchic empathy of someone who's always on the hunt for more. Here's hoping that means more stories like these in the very near future.
August 18, 2025
a beautiful kaleidoscope of memories, feels liek watching an anthology film reel playing different moments of life. memories are liek snow globes. some of them we want to live in 4evr. some of them we just appreciate for their beauty &&existence. i loved every chapter of this. i find gwen's writing to be so entrancing. a book that i will be returning to thru out diff points of my life. words that feel directly pulled from parts of my brain that i never had the capability of piecing togeth for myself. she is a genius in a way that i find so inspiring. this book was so inspiring. i am looking 4ward to diving deeper into her creative world. such a special and unique voice and creating being. gwen u are such a genius i loved this book so very much <3 thank u for writing this , it rly touched me. <3
ଘ(੭*ˊᵕˋ)੭* ੈ♡‧₊˚
ଘ(੭*ˊᵕˋ)੭* ੈ♡‧₊˚
May 13, 2024
GWEN HILTON has written a book that takes a defiant Stance on all U Normies. And if u dont like it, FUCK U. This is rugged individualism tole FIRST PERSON stile in a kinda aggressive, hip, autofictive wordplay. Just on time in this TRUMPIAN NEW WORLD ORDER that hates SEXUAL CHOICES. Git U Sum.
May 13, 2025
A wonderful debut from a brilliant young writer. Sent to the Silkworm House is a nonlinear novella that feels a bit like a collection of linked short stories. In it, Hilton tackles dysphoria, alienation, and social and class issues with eloquence and startling insight far beyond her years. Gwen Hilton is a writer to watch.
June 19, 2023
Hans Bellmer, known mostly for his bizarre dolls, took some famous photographs of fellow surrealist and lover Unica Zürn. Her body, masochistically entwined, resembles packaged meat.
Gwen Hilton’s debut Sent to the Silkworm House is similarly distorted, enchanted by the short breath of every sentence. Like staring into the black barbs of Zürn’s disappearing flesh, Hilton’s ratcheted lines cut.
Gwen Hilton’s debut Sent to the Silkworm House is similarly distorted, enchanted by the short breath of every sentence. Like staring into the black barbs of Zürn’s disappearing flesh, Hilton’s ratcheted lines cut.
August 3, 2025
Im afraid of what this is unlocking!! Very good!!
Favs: #8, 15, 17, 18
Favs: #8, 15, 17, 18
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews