Book Review

In “The Mothers,” a story in Julia Elliott’s excellent new collection, Kate is a screenwriter at an art colony dedicated to the creative work of mothers and their children. Kate spends her days getting high and working on a screenplay about a woman whose demonic Boston terrier opens a portal to hell, while Kate’s daughter, Ivy, is guided in her own creative work by a certified Montessori teacher. Ivy is one of six children at the colony—or are there eight? One day Kate notices two extra children (are they local? feral?) who catalyze a series of bizarre events: All the children begin wearing animal masks that make them hard to tell apart; Kate notices “what looks like a giant pupa dangling from a raw-timber beam”; later, Kate and her fellow mothers watch in horror as their children float down from the tops of trees. Is it performance art? Woodland magic? The sort of demonic possession that wouldn’t be out of place in Kate’s goofy screenplay?

“The Mothers” is typical of the most successful stories in Hellions in that it takes an ambiguous position on the vivid fantastical elements that are the hallmark of Elliott’s writing. When Kate and another mother visit the home of the mysterious local children, hoping to speak to their parents, “An animal—long, dark, musky—brushes against the women’s legs” before slipping under the sofa, but maybe it’s just a dog? And when Kate notices the pupa, the description is preceded by a wisp of smoke from the joint she’s been smoking, so maybe her senses are altered? Along the same lines, the beastly transformations in “Erl King,” about a college student who shacks up with a hippyish professor capable of growing fur and horns and even changing his size, might be related to their consumption of foraged mushrooms. And in “Another Frequency,” the visions of Viv, a former musician who supports her family by driving a delivery truck before Christmas, might stem from her exhaustion and depression, not from the strange staticy music she hears on the radio while driving her truck. But whatever their source, we happily follow Viv’s dreamy nighttime wanderings:

Hooded beings loomed over her, gnomic and musty, snouted and fanged. She felt their chants in her blood. One of them, its head floating high on a supple, scaly neck, sang in the most exquisite soprano she’d ever heard.

When Viv’s wife asks what happened, why she’s covered in mud, Viv can’t say, and neither can we.

“Another Frequency” is one of the more realistic stories in the collection, grounded as it is in the dreary routine of its protagonist, but many of the stories take place in worlds exaggerated for the sake of satire. In “Erl King,” the satirical target is the back-to-nature scene embodied by the so-called Wild Professor and his cohort, in which the professor’s predatory behavior is tolerated as eccentricity. In “The Mothers,” it’s the over-the-top venue itself, the Sophia Art Colony with its “devotion to the creative work of mothers and children, to gynocentric wisdom and the radical female gaze.” “The Mothers” culminates in an event where the mothers and their children give readings and performances in front of an audience made of up trendy Asheville people, the colony’s patrons: thespians, pharmaceutical moguls, the director of a philharmonic. Elliott goes even further in “Moon Witch, Moon Witch,” a story that toggles back and forth between the narrator’s real and virtual lives. For work she facilitates the savage de-cluttering and renovating of homes for sad, lonely people overwhelmed by their acquisitions; online, she’s a member of a libidinous Stone Age community whose denizens wear rat skulls and fur while chanting incantations and having sex. The language in both modes is exaggerated but recognizable: HGTV meets self-help on one hand; romantasy meets Conan the Barbarian on the other. The Stone Age sequences are the funniest in the collection (“You can bet I’ll be skulking by the fire tonight,” she messages one paramour), and “Moon Witch, Moon Witch” might remind readers of early George Saunders stories like “Sea Oak” in its use of a near future setting. That Elliot could employ such humor more often but chooses not to is a testament to her maturity and control.

At the other end of the tonal spectrum is “Arcadia Lakes,” perhaps the strongest story in the collection. When the lake outside her home floods, teenage Fern imagines its oceanic depths to be full of sea life, real and imaginary: “wobbegongs, ghost octopi and bioluminescent squid . . . a sea monster—clammy-eyed, old as the moon.” She imagines setting sail with her parents, who aren’t getting along and have retreated into their own private worlds; they barely speak throughout the story, leaving Fern to her fantasies. Fern, who doesn’t fit in at school, has an Instagram account where she posts drawings of the fantastic flora and fauna of an imaginary world, but bullies from her high school figure out her Instagram handle and start posting cruel comments. With nowhere to turn, Fern wanders the wooded lakeside and glimpses what she takes to be an actual sea monster:

As the creature whizzed toward her, Fern struggled to make sense of it—a giant catfish, she thought, immune to the toxicity of the pond. But down in her secret psyche, the intuitive depths of what scientists call the reptilian brain, the place where dreams and fears and instincts muddle, Fern understood that the being defied logic.

The encounter has the same intriguing ambiguity as those in “The Mothers” and “Another Frequency”: Has Fern found an actual monster, or has the desperate, lonely pressure of her life caused figments of her “secret psyche” to manifest? As the encounters continue, Fern begins to notice changes in her own body (nodules, tender growths like “ethereal caps of delicate fungi”), and there’s an uncomfortable suggestion of violation. Fern, like a victim of sexual abuse, has been made to feel chosen: “Though she should have been horrified, she felt a dreamy fascination as she stroked the secret accretions that connected her to a magical creature, making her special.”

“Arcadia Lakes” feels truer and more carefully observed than the other stories in Hellions that center on children, full though they are of colorful detail and funny dialogue. The hellion of the title story, a girl called Butter, is easy to root for, but all the go-carts and gators and Swamp Apes make it hard to understand the core of the story, which is Butter’s attraction to her distant cousin, Alex, who’s visiting from the comparatively urbane city of Aiken. And “The Maiden,” told as a collective “we” from the perspective of four children, puts so much focus on an odd girl called Cujo and her monstrous, otherworldly transformation that the story feels too simple, almost allegorical, and must rely on increasingly fantastical descriptions for its momentum. Unusually, the second half of the collection, beginning with “Arcadia Lakes,” is stronger than the first half. Elliott or her publisher may have felt compelled to start with the stories that appeared in the Best American and Pushcart anthologies, and the opening story, “Bride,” is indeed very strong. But “Bride” is an outlier in that it takes place in the past, at a scriptorium where a nun who transcribes books starts having visions she interprets as holy, and one wonders if such a story would do more work in the middle of the collection by breaking up the other, more similar stories. But that’s a very minor complaint. The collection is excellent, Elliott’s best book so far. It should appeal to fans of the well-wrought short story, of Southern Gothic and Magic Realism, and of the use of legendry and folklore in literary fiction. Julia Elliott is a writer of uniquely vivid power, and her writing sometimes verges on the sort of visionary intensity she attributes to the canny, open-minded protagonists of her finest stories.