About the Book
Finalist for the Southern Book Prize
"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.
About the Author :
Julia Elliott is the author of the story collection The Wilds, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and the novel The New and Improved Romie Futch (both from Tin House). Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, and the New York Times. She has won a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, and her stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. She teaches English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina and lives in Columbia with her husband, daughter, and five hens.
Review :
"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
“Marvelously diverse and divine magic from everyday lives.”—Largehearted Boy, A Favorite Short Story Collection of 2025
“This collection defies conventional story telling blending Greek and Roman mythology, mysticism, fairy tales and folklore, as well as allusions to the Old Testament and nursery rhymes. . . . Elliott’s prose is transcendent.”—Southern Literary Review
“Elliott writes sensory, sensual prose turned up to 11, with descriptions that practically explode. These rich and surprising stories, grounded in archetypal imagery, linger after reading the way a spent firework shimmers in the night sky before fading.”—Literary Hub, A Notable Small Press Book of 2025
"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 Southern Gothic fairy tales of seemingly original extraction; that’s what makes them great—and fresh…. [Elliott] might just be one of the best genre blenders to shed her human skin and screech."—The Southwest Review
"Bewitching. . . . Gothic, atmospheric, and filled with the lavish symbolism contained in the natural world."—Booklist
"A genius at the short-story form, Julia Elliott achieves new highs with the astonishing Hellions. Beautiful, visceral, surprising stories, both wild and dangerous, with a Southern twang but universal appeal. Elliott is an Angela Carter for our times. One of my favorite collections of the past few years." —Jeff VanderMeer, author of Absolution
"Julia Elliott’s fiction is its own country. Every sentence drips and unsettles, every character lusts and schemes, every landscape is alien and forbidding. But there is something eerily familiar pulsing underneath the wildness—the way your waking life snakes through the logic of your dreams. I am obsessed with these lush, feral stories."—Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties
"In Hellions Elliott has a remarkable ability to cross-pollinate subgenres of the fantastic and then ricochet between them to find new genres in the cracks. Fairy tales, folk magic, horror, Southern gothic, and dirty realism inflect one another and explode to make a swampy magic realism that only Elliott could write."—Brian Evenson, author of Good Night, Sleep Tight
