Hellions (Tin House)

Julia Elliott is the author of the story collections Hellions, longlisted for the 2026 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, and The Wilds, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, as well as the novel The New and Improved Romie Futch. 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.

Hellions by Julia Elliott

In a plague-stricken medieval convent, a nun works on a forbidden mystic manuscript. In rural South Carolina, an alligator named Dragon becomes a beloved pet for a precocious, tough-talking twelve-year-old. During a long, muggy July, 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, in eleven stories of earthbound characters who long for the otherworldly.