by Molly McGill
Trigger warnings: Body Horror, Graphic Violence, Animal death, Character Death, Parental Death, Starvation, Brief scene featuring chemical gassing.
Look no further than “Wilder Girls” by Rory Power for an immersive read. Despite the heavy subject matter, Power writes in beautiful, lyrical prose that sucks the reader in and before you know it, you’ve read the whole thing in less than a day.
“Wilder” Girls follows the lives of schoolgirls after being quarantined due to a mysterious illness they are all infected with. Raxter Academy boarding school resides on an island, mutated from an educational sanctuary to a prison.
“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 we harden and smooth over.”
The army delivers them food and supplies, but never enough for them all, normal lessons have been replaced with firearms training and adapting to their new existence. The disease, which they refer to as ‘The Pox’ affects them all in different ways, our main character, Hetty has lost the use of one of her eyes, while her friend Byatt has pointed sharp fingers instead of a normal hand. Some characters are mentioned as going completely feral and animalistic under the effects of ‘The Pox’, forcing those around them to take action to protect themselves.
“One day Mary was here and then she was gone- just the Tox left in her body, and no light in her eyes. Taylor was with her that day, had to wrestle her down and put a bullet in her head”
The most fascinating aspect of this book for me was the relationships between the girls. The former schoolgirls survived the initial onslaught of ‘Pox’ but have been physically changed. They formed smaller pack-like groups that cared for each other, slept together, and provided food for each other, like wild wolves. Our main trio: Hetty, Reese, and Byatt is one such co-dependant group. One of the earliest interactions between Hetty and Reese is their vicious fighting over an orange, which leaves Hetty injured and Reese victorious. However, Hetty does not take this personally and is well-adjusted to their situation. They must fight for everything. Hetty even carries out a ritual of good luck for her friends right afterward.
“Reese and Byatt, they’re mine and I’m theirs. It’s them I pray for when I pass the bulletin board and brush two fingers against the note from the Navy still pinned there, yellowed and curling.”
The letter from the navy represents a beacon of hope for the residents of the school, a promise that they will be cured. Every time a girl passes the letter, they touch it and pray for a cure for themselves and their own.
“I reach out as we pass the bulletin board and tap the note about the cure, right on the letterhead. That’s where the luck is best, and you can see how the color’s worn away where a hundred girls have touched it a hundred times.”
Power never lets the reader forget that these are young girls. Despite the hardship that they have experienced on the island, they still have the innocence of youth at their core, a childish optimism. The girls even still carry out familiar girlhood rituals cling to traces of the mundane, the remnants of their lives before Pox destroyed their normality. Power describes this beautifully, capturing the depth of the connection between the infected.
“Arguments over clothes and bedding, and a few sharper than that, but mostly the same conversations every day. The same magazines passed around and around, quizzes taken and retaken, the same memories told like stories until they belong to everybody. Parents sliced up to share, first kisses exchanged like gifts.”
This is my favourite paragraph in Wilder Girls, it succinctly captures the depth of connection between the girls. Power’s talent for lyrical prose sucks the reader into the story, sometimes edging further into the realm of poetry to convey the mindset of the character. This can be jarring to the reader but is utilised to signal an abrupt change in perspective and emotional state.
Another way that Wilder Girls has wormed its way into my heart is the Queer representation. As most of our characters are women and girls, most of the romances are among female students, still experiencing awkward teen romances despite their circumstances. Power captures the insecurity and insincerity very well in this book, weaving it with the more serious plotlines effortlessly and, most importantly, not sexualising her young characters! This is unfortunately very common in content that has LGBTQI+ female characters and it is very refreshing to read a romance that does not sink to this level.
However, this does not mean that men are negatively represented in this book. The girls have no contact with men on the island and think of them as a novelty, part of life before the island they were forced to leave behind.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Power eventually drops the hint that Hetty is an unreliable narrator, but only in the way she perceives other people and their intentions. I loved the contrast between how Hetty viewed Byatt.
“I love Byatt more than anything, more than myself, more than the life I had before Raxter… ‘She’s my sister Reese. She’s part of me.”
and how Byatt viewed herself.
“I never meant to hurt anyone. And sometimes I meant it. But sometimes I didn’t. Anger, depthless and black, and I couldn’t cut it out of me. Growing and growing until it was all I had room for.”
Hetty thinks very highly of Byatt but Byatt dwells on the negative aspects of her personality for the majority of her chapters. This fleshes out the characters into real people with preconceived notions.
“It shouldn’t matter to me. I have Byatt to worry about, and besides, I wrote Reese off years ago. Too closed, I remind myself, too cold. She’s only with me because she has nobody else.”
When Power establishes that Hetty is not completely impartial and omniscient, we are set up for her relationship with Reese to change. Until this point, we are led to believe that Reese has no interest in truly being friends with Hetty, and only puts up with her for the sake of Byatt. However, this is Hetty’s biased view. When we start to doubt Hetty, we are open to a change in Hetty and Reese’s relationship to evolve into a romantic one.
“So soft I can barely feel it, but I do, I do, and it lights me up like a match to paper. Our laughter falls away as the curve of her body fits to mine. She’s still smiling when she kisses me.”
A very cute and innocent romantic relationship that adds a light-hearted element to a story that dwells for so long on unhappy subjects.
In conclusion, this was a unique horror experience. Beautifully written and unique in a genre of repeated tropes. There are some familiar themes in this book that have been explored in horror before, but Power’s writing style elevates the overused to the fresh.
Molly McGill is a writer from County Derry, Ireland. She has a bachelor’s degree in film studies and creative writing from John Moores University and has a passion for writing and reading weird horror fiction.
