Hellions got a great review from Publisher’s Weekly: “A stultifying rural South Carolina provides the backdrop for these intoxicating, fantasy-tinged stories. . . . Elliott’s rich and magical landscape will pull readers in.”
My second short story collection, Hellions (Tin House, April, 2025) is featured in “Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2025.”
Check out Advance Reading Copy for a great interview with Jon Mayes and a wonderful review of Hellions by Erin Butler-Mayes.
Publishers Weekly lists Hellions as one of this “spring’s noteworthy novels and collections” in its “Literary Fiction” preview.
Though I’m always happy to have a story in Conjunctions, I’m particularly thrilled about the Revenants issue, where my ghost story “Henry” appears along with spooky tales by Margaret Atwood, Carmen Machado, Bradford Morrow, Elizabeth Hand, Brian Evenson, Joyce Carol Oates, Ben Okri, and more. Pre-order on Halloween and you’ll be haunted by every ghoul and phantom in this issue.
The Georgia Review just published my story “All the Other Demons” in their amazing summer issue (also featured on their website). The final story in Hellions (forthcoming from Tin House Books), this tale blends Southern Gothic horror with magic realism, hopefully capturing the profound experience of seeing The Exorcist as a twelve-year-old girl growing up in rural South Carolina.
Beth Steidle from Tin House Books has designed a stunning cover for Hellions (edited by Elizabeth DeMeo and coming in April 2025).
“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.
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” (Tin House).
I’m thrilled to announce that Tin House Books will publish my new story collection, Hellions, in spring 2025!
I’m always stoked to have a story in the amazing Conjunctions. Check out Work & Days, Issue 82, which explores “the work people have done over [the] millennia to make ends meet—to provide food, shelter, even community,” which “constitutes a multifaceted portrait of the human species itself” (Bradford Morrow). My story “The Mothers” depicts a feminist art colony in the North Carolina mountains. There, 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.
