Grotesque and illuminating and a little gory, but so very powerful and GIRL POWER will win the day.

The title and cover of Wilder Girls tells you right off the bat that this is going to be a little horrific, but lush and beautiful in its terror, too. Queer girl power in a Tox-infested boarding school, with mysterious and gory deformities sweeping across teacher and pupil alike? SUCH a compelling premise. As is usual with isolated boarding schools, there’s a fair amount of hijinks here, but not of the usual pranking and misbehaving variety. Far from the garden variety sort of secrets at the Raxter School for Girls, the deceits and betrayals and cloaked goals and shifting loyalties all test our characters as they fight for themselves, for their friends, and for their ultimate survival in this dog-eat-dog, girl-eat-girl world. A razor-sharp debut with haunting, gothic prose that leaps off the page and takes hold in your mind, and a hook that combines femininity, female love, friendship, and deliciously wicked fauna and flesh (lot of Fs there huh? Lol) as stand ins for survival. Really underlines eco-horror as a threat, but the evolution and decay of the outside is only half of it—the biggest threats come from ourselves, come from each other.