In what reads as a spiritual successor to her debut collection The Wilds, Pushcart Prize-winning author Julia Elliott has once again proven her mastery of the sinister folkloric short story with Hellions. This set of eleven tales enchants its readers with legends of monstrous alligators, flying cabins, bewitched children, and more, all in Elliott’s signature Southern Gothic-meets-fairy-tale style. Match this expansive world with the exquisite poise of Elliott’s writing—the whimsical diction, the attention to detail, the bold blend of archaic chant with modern slang—and you have the makings of a masterpiece.

Each story in Hellions near-perfectly executes the hallmarks of magical realism: a frank tone that forces the supernatural to feel natural, local legends held in reverence, a kind of small town mythmaking. Elliott meets (and possibly exceeds) the caliber of other giants of the genre, calling to mind the feminist undertones of Isabel Allende’s The Stories of Eva Luna, Laura Esquivel’s blend of magical heritage with contemporary setting in Like Water for Chocolate, and Miguel Ángel Asturias’ celebration of a civilization’s core mythologies in Leyendas de Guatemala.

One example of Elliott’s mastery of magical realism is the collection’s title story. “Hellion” follows Butter—a young, spunky tomboy known for riding bikes around town and for raising her pet alligator, Dragon—as she’s tasked with defending her new neighbor—Alex, a boy her age—from the dangers of her unique, small town southern world.

“A whole ’nother universe,” Butter tells Alex as he questions what she can show him. “Teach you how to drive a go-cart, how to shoot an air rifle, plus several techniques for handling a live gator. How to creep up on the Swamp Ape without making him bellow. Show you flesh-eating plants, the plat-eye demon floating over black water, and forest fairies mooching from hummingbird feeders.”

Of course Butter and Alex get into lots of mischief throughout the story, as children left largely to their own devices tend to do. Butter coaches Alex into a makeshift mind reader to earn him respect and safety from the other local boys. She teaches him the language of the frogs, shares snacks bought with a portion of her lizard-hunting money, and slowly develops a crush on this slowly-boldening city kid she’s been tasked to save. Even when a series of unfortunate circumstances leads to the crumbling of all Butter cares about, it is the magic of summer and new friendship that keeps her sane.

“But now,” Butter describes, “summer was at its height, offering its sweetest fruits, full of furry fairies and gleaming bugs. Alex leaned against me, humming with warm blood, his brain like a different universe.”

While “Hellion” wields significantly less actual magic than other stories in the collection, it uses the emphatic power of children and wild imagination to make even the mundane feel extraordinary. This focus on childhood belief also fuels the narrative of “The Mothers,” where children of several female fellows at a research retreat form a makeshift moth cult with mist-cloaked siblings from the woods, as well as “Arcadia Lakes,” where a child confronts a Nessie-esque being that lives in the algae behind her house. Children play a guiding role in the collection: they are the ones most in tune with the land’s magic, the ones who don’t let trivial matters like relationship drama, technology, work, or society tear them away from the marvelous.

Speaking of the more modern conventions in twenty-first-century society, Elliott is also unafraid to mash contemporary problems with the strangeness and allure of Old-World folklore. A later story in the collection, “Moon Witch, Moon Witch,” begins in the bowels of the Stone Age, with a woman’s ascension into power as the matriarch of her tribe, a literal Moon Witch with ties to the Great Tree and the ability to glimpse the future. It is only later we learn that this Stone Age world is all a charade, a fantasy dating simulator called Time Travel Dating, and that the Moon Witch is really an overworked simplicity consultant tasked with helping people declutter their homes and lives. The fantasy of the past and the reality of the future braid in and out of each other as the story unfolds, blurring at the intersection of the protagonist’s desire for a wondrous existence free of her real-world stressors:

“But I wasn’t ready for that first encounter in a safe space,” she says, “probably an overheated coffee shop where I’d consume too much caffeine and overthink every remark and worry about my weight and the visibility of my skin flaws. And if I wasn’t attracted to him (which would become apparent immediately, as it always did), every minute would be excruciating, the blight of disappointment hardening my heart like sclerosis as I made distracted small talk and plotted my escape.

—Let’s try a different module—another time, another place. Anything except the future.” 

Elliott tackles more modern problems in the collection’s other works, from the toxic professor-student relationship and thirst for knowledge seen in “Erl King” to the pedantic slog of a boring job and the crave for rekindled passion in “Another Frequency.” Every piece feels unique and impactful, but ultimately connected through the marvels of a southern summer: the buzz of cicadas, the lure of the wilds, the musical rhythm of a language no longer spoken. Elliott perhaps captures the heart of this outstanding collection in the following passage from her work’s penultimate story, “The Gricklemare”:

“Though she [Sylvia] fears it will wriggle through the moss, slither through dead leaves back to her cabin, and haunt her all over again, she reminds herself that normal rules of logic don’t apply to this situation—a kind of spell, she realizes, something she used to believe in when she was a child, a feeling that comes surging back, a reckless sense of wonder that she has forgotten.”

This heady mix of magic and reality is what keeps readers coming back for more. It’s a search for something that the real world can’t accurately explain, human truths formed more perfectly through illustrated emotion.