April 2025 (Tin House Books)
“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
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. Hellions is a genre-bending collection of stories that ranges like a feral dog from medieval Europe to the heart of the contemporary South and on into strange, tech-mediated futures.
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.
Praise for Hellions: Stories
“Each tale demonstrates how braving the wilderness, embracing your primitive instincts, and surrendering to madness offer consummate freedom and escape from the mundane. Gothic, atmospheric, and filled with lavish symbolism contained in the natural world, Elliott’s latest collection would be a good match for fans of experimental fabulist fiction and devotees of Angela Carter and Leonor Carrington.”
“Elliot’s prose is immersive and lush, with all the wonders and unexpected surprises of an overgrown patch of woods. . .. The fantastical elements create a new language that makes the familiar strange again. . .. The path forward is not always brightest in these transporting tales.”
“A stultifying rural South Carolina provides the backdrop for these intoxicating, fantasy-tinged stories. . . . Elliott’s rich and magical landscape will pull readers in.”
“Julia Elliott’s latest short story collection, is full of 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, “Here Are the 15 Books You Should Read in April”
“Incorporating elements of Southern gothic, fantasy, fairy tales, and other genres, [Hellions] showcases a fearless imagination.”
—The Washington Post, “11 New Paperbacks to Read this Month”
“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.”
— “Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2025”
“Julia Elliott writes delightfully disturbing short stories rendered in such lush detail and gorgeous prose, it’s easy to get lost in the wildly different worlds she creates, whether it’s a medieval convent, a magical forest or a tiny town in rural South Carolina. She’s like one of her characters, spinning a spell with her tales, making them feel lived instead of read, so that when they conclude, the ending really sticks.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“The stories in Hellions are 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 talented Julia Elliott alchemizes a mix of southern gothic horror and folktale, creating her own muggy, wild atmospheres in Hellions.. . . These are adult fairy tales at their finest.”
—Shelf Awareness, “The Best Books This Week”
“Hellions is a captivating collection that brings a blend of surreality and Southern gothic horror into every short story. Julia Elliott masterfully crafts these haunting tales, bringing both comedy and a dreadful sense of eeriness to every page.”
—Chicago Review of Books, “12 Must-Read Books of April 2025”
“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
“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.”
—The New York Times
“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
“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, “Can’t Miss Indie Press Speculative Fiction for March and April 2025”
“There are plagues, nuns, alligators, shape-shifters, supernatural happenings, mysterious twins, and more.”
“Let’s word cloud some ways people are describing this intriguing collection: Gothic, magical, lavish, unsettling, forbidding, feral.”
—Goodreads, “The Goodreads Editors Share Their April Book Picks”