Lush and evocative, rich and atmospheric, Hellions is a collection of loosely themed fantastical southern gothic short stories centered around the horror, magic, and mystery of the female experience. With narrators spanning from girls on the brink of puberty to loving and tired mothers to newly single academics to nuns and beyond, each character is a vibrant and nuanced exploration of how darn weird it can be to be a woman sometimes.

Rooted in place but spanning time, these stories defy genre, hovering on the edges of horror, fantasy, and literary. There are no jump scares, nothing overly gory, just the faint unease that comes with walking alone through the woods at night, knowing there are things beyond your understanding lurking somewhere in the dark. The southern atmosphere is a character in its own right in the collection; you can almost feel the sticky summer sun on your skin, hear the drone of mosquitos and the scream of cicadas and wildcats, feel the murky, muggy swampland squelch beneath the soles of your feet.

Julia Elliott deftly and masterfully weaves details to create stories that live beyond the bounds of their pages, with prose that’s dense and vivid but never inaccessible. Her characters, whether locals or outsiders, fully inhabit the worlds they’re in, always feeling like real, tangible human beings, even as they wrangle eerie ethereal kids or slowly turn themselves to woodland creatures. Fiercely feminist but never misandrist, magical but grounded, filled with hope and despair, beauty and horror, longing, nostalgia, contentment, and joy, these stories will stay with you for a while.