Hellions: Stories - Paperback

by Julia Elliott (Author)

Winner of the 2026 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction
Finalist for the 2026 Southern Book Prize
A TIME Best Book of the Month

"I am obsessed with these lush, feral stories."―Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties

"Beautiful, visceral, surprising stories, both wild and dangerous, with a Southern twang but universal appeal. Elliott is an Angela Carter for our times."―Jeff VanderMeer, author of Absolution

From the acclaimed author of The Wilds comes an electric story collection that blends folklore, fairy tales, Southern Gothic, and horror, reveling in the collision of the familiar with the wildly surreal.

In a plague-stricken medieval convent, a nun works on a forbidden mystic manuscript, pining for Christ's love. During a long, muggy July in rural South Carolina, an adolescent girl finds unexpected power as her family obsesses over the horror film The Exorcist. On the outskirts of a Southern college town, a young woman resists the tyranny of a shape-shifting older professor as she develops her own sorceress skills. And at a feminist art colony in the North Carolina mountains, a group of mothers contends with the supernatural talents their children have picked up from a pair of mysterious orphans who live in the woods.

With exuberance, ferocity, and astounding imagination, Julia Elliott's Hellions jumps from the occult to the comic, from the horrific to the wondrous, presenting earthbound characters who long for the otherworldly.

Author Biography

Julia Elliott is the author of the story collection The Wilds, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, and the novel The New and Improved Romie Futch (both from Tin House). Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, and the New York Times. She has won a Rona Jaffe Writers' Award, and her stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. She teaches English and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina and lives in Columbia with her husband, daughter, and five hens.