Matt Bell’s List of “Deeply Strange Reads”
Author Matt Bell, who just released the excellent collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, has a great weird fiction list up at The Center for Fiction: “Five Deeply Strange Reads.” Here’s his description of my collection The Wilds:
Julia Elliott’s fiction is the living proof of one possible future of the Southern gothic, adding to it her own brand of science fiction and apocalypse, religion and fairy tale, mixing these genres with a keen understanding of where their absurdities might overlap. Here characters undergo memory restoration procedures, watch their grandmothers levitate, live in houses beset by roving packs of wild dogs and wilder packs of neighborhood children. Religion abounds, but it’s an odd sort recognizable mostly in its embrace of the cosmologically absurd.
My dad, an avid reader and talented liar who looked like Jack Nicholson in his youth, infected me with the writing bug when I was about four, taking me upon his knee and reading the entire Chronicles of Narnia series. When I started writing poetry as a teen, he hyped my work and encouraged me to read gigantic classics like Crime and Punishment. His crumbling 1938 edition featured creepy woodblock prints that I remember examining as a child, including an image of Raskolnikov skulking behind a door, clutching an axe in his freakishly sinewy hand. When I got my first adolescent nose zit, my dad informed me that I probably carried the ancestral gene for a disease called “scabrunocatosis,” which involved a malfunctioning nose bone that never stopped growing, that would pop through my skin and eventually wreathe my head in a tangle of bone. Dad not only taught me how to make up dark, outlandish stories, but also encouraged a love for Russian lit that led to a Nabokov obsession in high school and college. On the other hand, my grandmother, the postmistress of Davis Station, SC, provided a steady supply of torrid pulp romances, which I pinched from her secret stash. Finally, in tenth grade, my high-school English teacher, a writer of YA history and fiction books, encouraged my lurid poetry, which gave me the confidence to apply to the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts summer program and also helped me score the Archibald Rutledge Scholarship (for poetry) in twelfth grade.
