Literary Horror discussion

Please join us for June's monthly read #1: Julia Elliot's collection Hellions: Stories.

A couple reviews:
https://southwestreview.com/a-fresh-b...
https://chapter16.org/normal-life-imp...

The title story:
https://www.thegeorgiareview.com/post...

Hellions is available on paper and as an e-book.

We'll start close to the weekend!

I'm in for this one! I already started reading a bit and I'm liking it a lot.

This is such a great collection! A wonderful follow-up to THE WILDS.

Katie (DoomKittieKhan) wrote: "This is such a great collection! A wonderful follow-up to THE WILDS."
I loved The Wilds! Good to hear this.

I read the first story while in a waiting room this morning, and I was very pleased. Big fan of anything that involves Jesus' metaphorical vagina, and my bedroom overlooked a spooky convent when I was a kid. I'm the target audience for this one. I also generally think we need more stories about lesbian nuns that aren't male gaze-y to make up for the 70s.

"Bride" was very enjoyable, lesbian nuns and all. We loved The Wilds, and here's Wilda. I really liked the grim historical realities, all the flesh and rot and bodily fluids. And blackberries. (I just finished Krystelle Bamford's Idle Grounds, and am a little sensitive about blackberries at the moment.)

"Hellion" seems relatively conventional. I did enjoy the narrator's voice, and the depiction of the kids' friendship and wistful eventual separation. Nice endings on both.

I really enjoyed "The Erl King", with its messy magic and transformations. The arc isn't that surprising, though the pokes at academia are hilarious. I loved Elliot's language. Not just for the transformations, which they bring to magical life, but also passages like

I hung up and called my mother.
"Honey lamb," she said. I longed for the sweet warmth of her, before her body became taboo flesh, when she was omniscient, a mystery that I spent ten years trying to solve. I remembered the two of us pretending to be foxes, crawling on all fours and eating wild blackberries.

And of course it didn't hurt that there are again blackberries.

I don't have much of an opinion on "Hellion." I do love the cover it inspired. I also liked the narrator.

"The Earl King" was great. I loved how the author was constantly highlighting the contrast between the magical and the mundane and how that reinforced what she was trying to say about men like the professor. I especially enjoyed the vaguely 80s setting.

I also liked "The Maiden." Looking back on it, I think I might have enjoyed the 80s teenage politics more than the supernatural parts. (view spoiler)[That party? Horrifying. Cujo going full Carrie would have been totally justified. (hide spoiler)]

I enjoyed "The Maiden" more than "Hellion", its growing-up southern Gothic sister story. There were some nice eerie moments, and I'm old enough to get the Cujo reference right away.

"Flying": I have a soft spot for these jaundiced fairy tales when they're done well, and Elliot is so good here. The magical surprises just keep coming. All that tasty food had me salivating. And (view spoiler)[is the witch really the narrator's mother (hide spoiler)]?

I liked "Flying," but it left me wanting more. I liked the birth scene, the main character's kids, the priest, and the scenery descriptions all a lot. Maybe I should have gone to bed one story sooner, because I didn't pick up on any hints of Bill's spoiler.

I think my favorite bit of "Arcadia Lakes" was the parents. They were only in a little bit of the story, but I felt like I really understood who they were. I also liked the ending. It was not what I was expecting.

I also really liked "The Mothers." I am usually not a fan of stories that are trying to say something about being an author or some other kind of creative professional, so I liked that this had a lot more going on. A lot of the scares were familiar, but it still felt fresh. I really liked the main character's screenplay.

I have been liking the story arrangement so far. There have been a lot of repeated elements, but I feel like the little shifts in tone and genre keep it from being too repetitive.

I'm not finished, but I think "Moon Witch, Moon Witch" will be my favorite in the collection. It's delightfully odd. I like the idea of the narrator fantasizing about the past from a future that didn't seem to be much better or worse than our present.

Instead of switching to a different book like I planned, I read another story. I liked "Another Frequency," but it lost me a bit at the end. (view spoiler)[ I might be the problem, because I am not sure that I know what an iguana's face looks like, but I felt a bit let down by the giant Lovecraftian lake monster. I think I was expecting the story to go in a more horrific direction. (hide spoiler)] I did enjoy the Christmas setting and the narrator's voice, especially when she was talking about music.

I thought "Arcadia Lakes" was fairly straightforward for the most part, with some nice imagery and language, and body horror. Agree with Vanessa that the ending was a nice surprise, but it took awhile to get there.

I loved "The Mothers", starting with the "wrong number" of kids that signals something is wrong. Brian Evenson's "Windeye", a favorite, also centers on a miscount: the number of windows in a house is different from the inside vs. the outside. The kids' rebellious rejoinders are hilarious. Then all the drug use and delirium, especially the episode in Elva and Brock's house! Magic or technology? Probably both. What an ending.

"Moon Witch, Moon Witch" is also a favorite, but the competition is really stiff by this point. I love the two business concepts, Hone (I could certainly use some honing, though I'm not about to pay for it) and Time Travel Dating (the VR really pushes it over the top). It took a few pages for me to figure out what was really going on, then I was laughing through the end with all the clever ideas and hilarious set pieces.

I'm fine with this being the Vanessa and Bill show so far. But is anyone else reading the book? (Inciminci?)

Vanessa:
There have been a lot of repeated elements, but I feel like the little shifts in tone and genre keep it from being too repetitive.

Totally agree. The shapes of the stories are somewhat similar. But the clever details and the excellent prose are delightful.

I finished Monstrilio and plan to start Hellions this week. The banter here is delightful and I can’t wait to join in.

Lili wrote: "I finished Monstrilio and plan to start Hellions this week."
Great. Look forward to your impressions.

I loved "Another Frequency". How can I not, with all those aging hipster music references? The arc is very similar to H.G. Wells' "The Door in the Wall", which I still remember from my teens: at various crucial points in his life, the narrator sees a mysterious door in the wall. He goes through the door to enter a magical place, but things take a dark turn and he gets into big trouble when he returns to the mundane world. Here the radio and mysterious station keeps leading the protagonist into misadventures. Both stories end with the implication that (view spoiler)[the protagonist gives up on the mundane world and disappears into the magical world for good (hide spoiler)].

The leviathan didn't bother me. (I've always thought iguanas look kind of goofy.) I read it as just a symbol for the darkness in these magical experiences, and didn't expect it to go anywhere.

"The Gricklemare" was also a winner for me. I loved how it interweaves dark folklore, ominous hints of environmental collapse (an earlier story also mentioned the impending extinction of bees), gross food imagery, and queasy creature design. And that annoying ex Alex who never goes away; is he an astral projection of the creature's?

I was a bit disappointed in the last story. It seems a bit of a departure, with The Exorcist (!) and early 80s TV (as identified in the helpful Notes). A fun well-written piece, but after the twin peaks (?) of "Another Frequency" and "The Gricklemare", I was hoping for more.

So I loved this collection, a shoo-in for my favorites of 2025. I hope Julia Elliot has more stories to share soon; we had to wait ten years since The Wilds.

(If you haven't looked at her author photo, it's hilarious.)

Nominations for July's monthly read?
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

I'm leaning towards the Grinklemare being physically both Alex (not Alex) and the gross baby cryptid. (view spoiler)[My favorite part of the story is the moment when Sylvia abruptly realized what was going on. (hide spoiler)]

I think "All the Other Demons" suffered a bit for being the second coming-of-age story that is centered around a viewing of The Exorcist that I've read. I loved Cabbage. The characterization of the parents was also very good but pales in comparison to Cabbage. I liked that she found the commercials that aired. The Internet Archive is wonderful.

Vanessa wrote: "I'm leaning towards the Grinklemare being physically both Alex (not Alex) and the gross baby cryptid."

Hmm, interesting! I can see that.

So what's the other coming-of-age Exorcist story?

I'll let you know when I figure it out. I must not have gave the collection any tags, because I haven't found it yet.

July poll is up! I added a third book (from the 2024 Stoker nominees):
https://www.goodreads.com/poll/show/3...

Sorry to be so late to the party! I have read this book, though I had to interrupt my reading for a trip and continued afterwards. So there's only an overall impression of this book left in my head the first part kind of blurry. I still love the way it starts, but it doesn't really hold up for me later. When I think about it now, there are three or four stories about children/group of children/neighborhood children who do stuff together, there's one outlier and something supernatural involved; like Hellion, The Maiden, Arcadia Lakes, Mothers. These stories, maybe also because I didn't read it in one go, meshed up in my head, and turned into one story, it's hard to explain. I'm not really complaining, but overall they felt very similar to me. It may be because English isn't my first language that I couldn't pick up nuances. It was a weird reading experience.

My favorite stories were Erl-King and Flying, I took both as different interpretations of a witch, I found both feminist, though possibly all her stories are.

I really wished I liked this collection more, but as I said, I did struggle with the language a little as it was a little hard for me to understand everything. I still enjoyed it overall, and I'm glad I've read it. Sorry again for disappearing for so long.