Rory Power

Feminist horror, yes please and thank you, may I have some more?

(Full disclosure: I received a free e-ARC for review through NetGalley. Trigger warning for suicide.)

The Tox didn’t just happen to us. It happened to everything. [...]

The way it happened is that the woods got it first. That’s what I think, anyway. Even before the wilderness reached inside us, it was seeping into the earth. The trees were growing taller, new saplings springing up faster than they had any right to. And it was show more fine; it was nothing worth noticing, until I looked out the window and couldn’t see the Raxter I knew anymore. That morning two girls tore each other’s hair out over breakfast with an animal viciousness, and by afternoon the Tox had hit us.

***

“We’ve been studying them,” Paretta says, crouching down in front of me. “The irises, and the blue crabs too. All of this is something we’re calling the Raxter Phenomenon.”

A phenomenon. Not a sickness, not a disease. It burns through my heart—that’s the word I’ve been looking for—but there’s something about the way she says it. The name too familiar, too easy on her tongue.

“Did they teach you about Raxter Blues at school?” she asks. “About what makes them special?”

I nod.

You mean the lungs

“And the gills,” Paretta says. “It’s pretty amazing, right? So it can survive anywhere. And I think it’s pretty amazing, too, that you girls are part of it now.”

Part of it. The way our bodies alter and bend. The way our fingers darken just before we die, pure black spreading up to our knuckles.

***

I think I have been a problem all my life. Here I am where problems go. First Raxter and now here, and I have always been heading here, haven’t I, haven’t I. Too bright and too bored and something missing, or perhaps something too much there.

***

The several hundred tweens and teens who attend the Raxter School for Girls run the gamut. Some, like Hetty Chapin, were admitted on scholarship when her father, a Navy man, was stationed at nearby Camp Nash. Others are warehoused there by parents who didn't know how to deal with them; this would describe Hetty's bestie Byatt. And then there's Reese, the third point in this particular triumvirate (just one of many cliques at Raxter), who grew up on the island and whose father, Mr. Harker, works as a groundskeeper and general caretaker at Raxter.

Aside from the occasional tour group, he's also the only cis man to walk Raxter Island on the regular. (That we know of! Dun dun duuuun!)

Raxter was already home to several biological anomolies - the Raxter irises, which bloom all year long; and the Blues, crabs that sport both gills and lungs for all-terrain survival - so perhaps it shouldn't have come as a surprise when the Tox hit, altering the landscape of Raxter in ways both horrifying and wondrous. The flora took over, transforming Raxter into a forested backdrop from so many Grimm fairy tales. The nonhuman inhabitants grew to monstrous sizes. Predators became vicious and unpredictable, and even herbivores like deers sprouted canines better suited to ripping flesh from bones than leaves from trees.

And the girls.

The girls were either reclaimed or transformed by the wild, depending on your point of view; made a part of Raxter's savage, shifting ecosystem, or else metamorphosed into something new. Something better. By which I mean something better suited to its environment; something with more favorable odds of survival. Their old environment or new one, you ask? Both. Neither. All of the above.

When the Tox hit, it changed everyone, though not in the same ways. One of Hetty's eyes fused shut. Byatt grew a second spine and, eventually, her voice became a weapon capable of inflicting great violence. Reese's skin turned silver and scaly, one of her hands grew lizard claws, and her hair took on an ethereal aura. Some girls grew teeth inside of them and coughed them up at night; one started to feel a second heartbeat in her chest. Blisters, boils, bruises, sores, scars. Webbed fingers and gills. No one bothers to hide their anomalies anymore; what's the point?

Most of the adults dropped dead, save for Ms. Welch and the Headmistress. Mr. Harker started acting erratic and then disappeared into the woods. Some of the girls succumbed as well; the rest live in constant dread of the next flare-up.

Raxter Island is under quarantine; the school, already surrounded by an imposing iron fence, has become a prison/sick ward. Already isolated, internet service to Raxter was cut off pretty quickly. The regular supply drops help, but it seems that there's never enough food to go around. Camp Nash, along with the Navy and CDC, implores the girls to stay alive and wait for help to come.

But it's been a year and a half. How long can they hold on?

Spoiler alert: not much longer. When Byatt falls ill - by which I mean extremely ill, sicker than the others and in such bad shape that she cannot get around on her own - and is sent up to the super-secretive infirmary wing of the school, it sets in motion a chain of events that will bring everything to a head. Everyone at Raxter misses someone, or something. The question becomes, to what depths are they willing to sink to get it?

Wilder Girls is such a great story - true, edge-of-your-seat, white-knuckle reading. The characters are complex and compelling; the dynamics between Hetty-Byatt and Hetty-Reese and Hetty-Byatt-Reese are fascinating, and there's a really lovely f/f romance in here to boot. The atmosphere is sufficiently spooky and the adults make for great villains (or antiheroes, again depending on your POV). The writing is a thing of beauty, and the subversive feminist elements really make the story shimmer and sparkle (and assail you with painful insights). This is a memorable piece of feminist horror with a dystopian twist, and I can't wait to see what Power does next.

Honestly, the only downside (and reason for the four-star rating) is the ending, which leaves things a little open-ended for me. Then again, wrapping things up with a shiny red bow would have felt cheap and dishonest, so there's that.

I won't say more for fear of spoiling things (it's really best to go in cold I think), but the hype is real. Badass ladies (and male allies), you want to read this book.

http://www.easyvegan.info/2019/07/09/wilder-girls-by-rory-power/ show less

Wilder Girls begins rather innocuously: two girls, outside, hunting wildlife. It isn't until four paragraphs in that we begin to sense something is terribly wrong... "My other eye’s dead, gone dark in a flare-up. Lid fused shut, something growing underneath. It’s like that, with all of us here. Sick, strange, and we don’t know why. Things bursting out of us, bits missing and pieces sloughing off, and then we harden and smooth over." A strange sickness has spread through the land, show more infecting the young and healthy. When a girls' school becomes ground zero for the Tox, a forced quarantine creates a microcosmic dystopia. The author does a fantastic job of crafting this thread of dread and impending doom throughout the story. I particularly enjoyed the juxtaposition of beautiful language with grotesque/macabre imagery (another book that handles this contrast well is Little Nothing by Marisa Silver). Many early reviews have compared Wilder Girls to Lord of the Flies. Personally, I think the book felt more reminiscent of Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation with its phantasmagorical horror. Overall, I found Wilder Girls to be an excellent read and an impressive debut from Rory Power.

Disclaimer: I was gifted an advance reader's copy of Wilder Girls. My review is based on an uncorrected proof. show less

In a Garden Burning Gold is a beautifully crafted tale set in a world where certain families hold the magical powers taken from the land that control the nature of the world around them. They are known as the Stratagiozi. Their father, Vasilis and his four children, twins Rhea and Alexandros, Nitsos and Chrysanti all hold different gifts that affect the world around them. Rhea takes a new consort each season to bring a new season, she must kill them to end the season. Alexandros weaves the show more stars into the sky each night and controls the tides of the ocean, Chrysanti paints the plants and flowers to change the colors of the world and Nitsos, the black sheep of the four, is confined to building mechanical flora and fauna that remains inside the home.
The story is told from the viewpoints of Rhea and Alexandros in alternating chapters. Alexandros knows that there is unrest in a remote area of the country and wants Rhea to choose her next consort from that area so that she can infiltrate the resistance and be a spy for him. Rhea finds that she has chosen this man without having really made that decision. Nevertheless she goes with Michali, where she unexpectedly falls in love with this consort whom she is expected to kill at the end of the season. While Alexandros, who is also his fathers second, tries to shore up support for his family due to his fathers increasingly erratic behavior.
Overall a fantastic read for fans of Katherine Arden's Winternight Trilogy or Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver book. Loved it. Highly recommend and definitely looking forward to the next book in this duology! show less

Review from September 21, 2021 (posted on Goodreads)

I am very glad I took a chance on this book. If you’re like me, either through some preconceived notions on what “young adult” fiction is, or by bad luck reading a string of kinda bad, very boring YA novels in college, you might not have the faith to pick up anything with a YA tag. Let me reassure you that there are gems in this genre, and Wilder Girls is one of them. Adults can and should read this book. The writing is pretty and show more disturbing. It is tender and callous. A quick read, no unnecessary density (unlike my reviews, ehehe) but a book you can lose yourself in.

Horror fans, if you are up for a book that portrays teens a little more tenderly, and you’re not afraid to tap in to your inner vulnerable teenager that I know you have stashed away deep inside, you will have fun with this one too. The main feast is the body horror, coming in enough variations to be a fun treat no matter what your personal favorite flavor. The medical bodily harm had my heart rate through the roof. Blood everywhere. It doesn’t dwell but it doesn’t hold back. We are given descriptions of the mutations these young girls (and the animals that roam the nearby forest) are experiencing with the detached casual feeling of someone doing their best to compartmentalize the horror in order to survive it. Side dishes include a bleak, isolated location, the constant threat of something morbid and unknown pressing in, sapping your warmth page by page, and of course children in peril. Desert is the sharp knife of survival horror, as the desperate need to not die on this horrid diseased island, relying on government supplied food drops, is a major concern to every character.

What did I think of it? It had me charmed. The first few pages reel you in by describing Hetty, the main character, and her eye (the one she’s hiding on the beautiful cover behind her hair) that has been fused shut, something moving behind it, and how her best friend Byatt helps sew shut the surface wound that reopens every once in a while. I couldn’t stop reading. From the start, their need to be understood and supported by their friends, loved ones, anyone, is universal, something we can all tap into.
Through the whole novel I was moved by the humanity of all these young ladies. They comment several times and doing what it takes to survive, and there is cruelty, violence, anger. Tough decisions. But this novel is not Lord of the Flies: through every harsh reality and hurtful mistake, these girls never completely forget their humanity. They try to do the right thing, they try to protect others, they try to absolve their guilt, even as they fight over a single moldy orange, even as they comply with their forced target practice, as they hide in the woods from monsters. They are stripped of society and civilization but are still holding the bloody scraps of what each of them actually cares about, and they refuse to let go of that. We only get glimpses into who they where before, only tiny slivers of personality can surface when they are numb from watching dozens of classmates die painful, screaming deaths and burning the corpses behind the main building. But there is enough here for all of us to connect to, as fellow humans.

A good ways into the book, there was an event with a scalpel that I read around 11:30 at night that left me feeling wired, physically writhing as I forced myself to read. They kicked it up a notch and I knew if I stopped there all I’d be thinking about all night was muscle and tendons, so I read the last 100 or so pages in a fugue state. And then the book ended, like the proper dire, horrific, betraying situation that it was, leaving me with this mental anxiety wound gaping and bleeding and nothing to do but let it cool in the 1am air and try to come down from the high. It was like I was begging it to just rip the bandaid off, and it finally did, and took my arm with it. Reading it so late at night was a mistake (some of us aren’t lucky enough to be trapped day after day on a quarantined island and we have to get up early for work) but it was a great mindset to be in, exhausted and vulnerable, reading about exhausted vulnerable girls trying to survive- it’s going to stay with me for a while.

Wilder Girls is memorable and fun and sad- a notable highlight of my reading this year. I don’t know that it will change you, but it will take you by the hand cautiously, with a small hesitant smile, lead you behind the dark trees hidden from view, and show you the mutated, writhing, multiple-eyed corpse of a dead bobcat it just shot with a hunting rifle. And then maybe kiss you (pretty chaste because it doesn’t know if you feel the same, and neither do you really) right there as the dead thing watches you from the ground, growing fleshy roots into the dirt and dead leaves, before you’re both consumed by the plague, a flesh eating deer, or the hazmat team finally takes you away for testing. It just wants to have one sad, sweet first kiss with you over mutated dead animals, can’t you do that? Just this once? show less