Moss, Mud, & Robot Limbs

Like the Turdus philomelos, the songbird that shores up its nest with dung, mud, and rotted wood, and which Julia Elliott invokes in the opening story of The Wilds, this debut collection gathers together the social, technological, and consumerist detritus of everyday life and reveals how it has become embedded in our dreams and fantasies. Like the figure of the wolfman who appears in a number of the stories in the collection, Elliot’s fictions reintroduce an irrepressible and sprawling wilderness into our cozy domesticated rooms nested with flat screen TVs, social media platforms, and farm-raised salmon. The result is a modern-day southern gothic-meets-sci-fi collection in which our slowly vanishing wilderness—sold off in parcels and relegated to medical spas and eco-tourist haunts—reemerges in our imaginations, as she writes, “thick and deep, full of shape-shifting beasts and fake Neanderthals.”

Elliott’s stories reveal the wilds encroaching on the allegedly safe and sometimes decadent domestic spheres we have shored up around us to protect ourselves from the frightening, if compelling, wilderness whose very nature has transformed in the twenty-first century. The cacophony in Elliott’s vision of the contemporary world—with its agri-industrial complex, its monocropping, its genetic modification, its ubiquitous beeps and screens—blends with the no less perilous melody of the irrepressible wilderness around our homes, resulting in imaginative almost-worlds that are at once deeply familiar and laughably strange. In every story, where these worlds meet, the edges of our identities blur in swamp fog as much as pixilated screens. Elliott’s treatment of this condition—a lyricism equal in its attention to language, nature, and technology—casts a spell over its characters and readers alike.

Language, in Elliott’s stories, is simultaneously evolving and devolving, changing and transforming like the “wild” creatures she writes about. Often language itself becomes a site of resistance. The narrator of “Jaws,” for instance, spins for her parents the detailed saga of a “brutal duck-raising technology” so as to make her father “taste the despair of the cage” and to reassert her independence from the “archetypal bodies” that raised her. But at the same time language in Elliott’s stories can come un-tethered from its normative meaning. “De-domesticated” and “defamiliarized,” these alienated utterances explore the wilderness of words, sentences, spells, and enchantments. “Cancer, tulips, radon, Slim Jims,” the narrator of “Jaws” desperately lists for her mother. “Tadpoles, Telletubbies, Rasputin, Atari.” Her gibberish becomes an incantation free to roam the impasses of lost memory, to complete a lingering, run-on sentence, the beginning of which has long since been forgotten. Like the wild dogs that remake the towns through which they pass in “Feral,” the language in Elliott’s stories takes on its own agency, is often rebuilt in new forms, new phrases, which showcase the concealed wilderness that lurks around the edges of our familiar fronts—even the words we use to describe them.

In each of Elliott’s stories, there is a longing, deep and undeniable, to merge with this wilderness in some meaningful way. When a wild pack of dogs makes its way into civilized parts of the South in “Feral,” filing in from the “magic parts of the earth” not yet colonized by shacks, cabins, and double-wides, it brings change, to everyone, to everything, even to the dogs’ own DNA: some of the alphas sport incisors more monkey than mutt; some can retract their claws like felines. Lawns, classrooms, and dumpsters are transformed by the pack, and domestic dogs, children, and even our narrator are tempted away from the “monotonous sycophancy” of their tidy lives by the promise couched in the feral howl.

The transformations of the narrator of “Feral” and her paramour, an expert in the burgeoning field of “de-domestication studies,” reveals a wilderness deep in human desire which, as each story shows in its own way, chokes our manufactured civilization, the cultural constructs suppressing memory, love, and even appetite. In Elliott’s fictions, glistening tendrils and vines wrap...