I had a great time drinking wine, running my mouth, and exploring creepy bomb shelters with a smart crew from Antie Bellum Magazine. Listen to the podcast, in which we talk about my novel The New and Improved Romie Futch, South Carolina’s mysterious Monkey Island, hamadryas baboons, monsters, psychedelic summers, mind-altering parasites, and more.
I had a hard time keeping my cool when The Los Angeles Review of Books asked me to review Brian Evenson’s brilliant new collection, A Collapse of Horses. I’ve suffered a few side effects, though. Every night at 3:00 am a creature now appears beside my bed. It might be a robot. It might be an armored subhuman (or even a catfish in a tin suit). In a gurgly voice, this “furnisher” attempts to sell me jerky, flashing bits of twisted meat before my groggy eyes. It won’t go away until I buy a piece. I always put the smoked flesh on my night stand, and in the morning I find nothing but a greasy stain.
Check out the amazing cover design from Coffee House Press (three reissues combined with the new collection form this amazing man-beast):
Keith Rawson recommends The New and Improved Romie Futch in LitReactor’s Staff Picks Best Books of 2015 list:
“I absolutely loved this novel, and if Elliott continues along the literary path she’s currently taking, there’s a better chance than not that we may very well have the next Kurt Vonnegut on our hands. Yeah, you heard me right, deal with it. [Review]”
Are you curious about whether or not an incubus can knock up a mortal woman? Are you burning to find out what the heck happened to Christ’s foreskin after the holy circumcision? If so, check out this list I wrote for Electric Literature.
I’m stoked and atingle that Lincoln Michel, author of the wonderful genre-bending collection Upright Beasts, included The Wilds in “The 10 Best Genre-Bending Books.”
For a long time, there have been literary urban planners invested in cordoning off and containing books into their proper plots. They’ve demanded that “literary fiction” confine itself to this complex, and that over here is zoned for “science fiction” and over there zoned only for “magical realism.” Luckily for adventurous readers, there have been plenty of writers who’ve used their books as sledge hammers, knocking down the artificial walls between genres in the night. These writers slip through the holes, strolling through fantasy gardens in the morning and eating lunch at the murder mystery mall before retiring to their macabre abodes in the graveyard of horror. Read more.
Not long ago at Drip on Main I drank a gallon of coffee and attempted to answer R. Mac Jones’s excellent questions. I sputtered gibberish, twitched, and dribbled latte foam, but R. Mac concealed his horror, redacted my rants on brain parasites and angelic speech, and miraculously managed to make me sound coherent in this Fiction Writers Review interview.
I had fun chatting with Lily McLemore from BookPage about mutant hogs, cyborg brains, and taxidermy. She asked me lots of great questions about The New and Improved Romie Futch.
The November issue of O The Oprah Magazine recommends slow-roasted turkey wings and The New and Improved Romie Futch:
“A sad-sack taxidermist joins an intelligence experiment and instantly becomes a certified genius in this frenetically surreal novel.”
BookRiot readers like The Wilds! “44 of Your Favorite Short Story Collections” lists some of my favorite collections, including The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, Can’t and Won’t: Stories by Lydia Davis, The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by Z.Z. Packer, Get In Trouble by Kelly Link, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender, How to Breathe Under Water by Julie Orringer, North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud, The Shell Collector by Anthony Doerr, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell, Tenth of December by George Saunders, The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Windeye by Brian Evenson.
In this “Research Notes” piece for Necessary Fiction, I not only explain how I faked knowledge of brain enhancement technologies, taxidermy, and hog hunting, but I threw in a slick product placement for Feral Fire™ Sow in Heat Spray, which contains “all the power of a Sow in Heat [in a] handy spray bottle.” To learn more about “this potent sow urine, [which ] has all the magic it takes to put that Trophy Boar in the hot seat,” click here!