"I am obsessed with these lush, feral stories."―Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties
"Beautiful, visceral, surprising stories, both wild and dangerous, with a Southern twang but universal appeal. Elliott is an Angela Carter for our times."―Jeff VanderMeer, author of Absolution
A TIME Best Book of the Month
From the acclaimed author of The Wilds comes an electric story collection that blends folklore, fairy tales, Southern Gothic, and horror, reveling in the collision of the familiar with the wildly surreal.
In a plague-stricken medieval convent, a nun works on a forbidden mystic manuscript, pining for Christ's love. During a long, muggy July in rural South Carolina, an adolescent girl finds unexpected power as her family obsesses over the horror film The Exorcist. On the outskirts of a Southern college town, a young woman resists the tyranny of a shape-shifting older professor as she develops her own sorceress skills. And at a feminist art colony in the North Carolina mountains, a group of mothers contends with the supernatural talents their children have picked up from a pair of mysterious orphans who live in the woods.
With exuberance, ferocity, and astounding imagination, Julia Elliott's Hellions jumps from the occult to the comic, from the horrific to the wondrous, presenting earthbound characters who long for the otherworldly. Swamp apes and Slim Jims populate the rural landscape of this collection, which swings from comedy to horror in stories about pet alligators, shape-shifting professors and more.-New York Times Book Review
Incorporating elements of Southern gothic, fantasy, fairy tales, and other genres, [Hellions] showcases a fearless imagination.
-Washington Post
Feral fairytales with a gothic twist….Blurring the line between reality and fantasy, Hellions provides an unsettling look at what it means to be alienated in our technology-driven world.
-TIME, Best Book of April
Delightfully disturbing short stories rendered in such lush detail and gorgeous prose....Elliott explores our modern world in way that surprise and resonate.-Atlanta Journal Constitution
Intoxicating, fantasy-tinged. . . . Elliott's rich and magical landscape will pull readers in.-Publishers Weekly
The talented Julia Elliott alchemizes a mix of southern gothic horror and folktale, creating her own muggy, wild atmospheres.-Shelf Awareness
Elliott has a penchant for blending lived-in settings with big conceptual flexes; these stories continue in that tradition, covering everything from strange familial dynamics to magic's effect on an art colony.
-Reactor
Jeff VanderMeer called Elliott an Angela Carter for our times, and he's absolutely right. Elliott's fiction blends folklore and fairy tale, reality and strangeness, the surreal and the mundane to make dazzling mobiles of oddity-and her new collection is shaping up to be her most curious to date. From medieval convents to small Southern towns, Elliott's protagonists make her strange worlds seem vibrantly real.-LitHub, A Most Anticipated Book of 2025
These tales teem with supernatural creatures - demons, hags, changelings, and swamp apes - but it's the humans who are most compelling…. Elliot offers stories that defy categorization, challenging readers to see the world as limitless, beyond understanding, and therefore worth exploring.-Chapter 16
Captivating…. Julia Elliott masterfully crafts these haunting tales, bringing both comedy and a dreadful sense of eeriness to every page.-Chicago Review of Books
Hellions is the best short story collection I've read in a while. Elliott experiments with different types of horror in every story, from the fantastic to the domestic. Anyone who has spent a summer in a rural Southern town can recognize the collection's harsh shadows, overbearing sun, and buzzing air.
-Las Vegas Weekly
Singular and compelling…. Full-throated, grown-ass Souther
