Excellent debut novel filled with phantasmagorical horror

Wilder Girls begins rather innocuously: two girls, outside, hunting wildlife. It isn't until four paragraphs in that we begin to sense something is terribly wrong... "My other eye’s dead, gone dark in a flare-up. Lid fused shut, something growing underneath. It’s like that, with all of us here. Sick, strange, and we don’t know why. Things bursting out of us, bits missing and pieces sloughing off, and then we harden and smooth over." A strange sickness has spread through the land, infecting the young and healthy. When a girls' school becomes ground zero for the Tox, a forced quarantine creates a microcosmic dystopia. The author does a fantastic job of crafting this thread of dread and impending doom throughout the story. I particularly enjoyed the juxtaposition of beautiful language with grotesque/macabre imagery (another book that handles this contrast well is Little Nothing by Marisa Silver). Many early reviews have compared Wilder Girls to Lord of the Flies. Personally, I think the book felt more reminiscent of Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation with its phantasmagorical horror. Overall, I found Wilder Girls to be an excellent read and an impressive debut from Rory Power.

Thank you Bookish First and Delacorte Press for sending me an advance reader's copy of Wilder Girls.