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NEW WEIRD: Wilder Girls by Rory Power (Novel)

I’d been trying to figure out how to describe this book for as long as I was reading it. Recently, my friend said, “The world is dying and my body reflects that.” That sentence does the job pretty well.
Wilder Girls is a novel that does interesting work in blending body horror with romance and inexplicable science fantasy. All of these elements work in tandem, making for an experience that cannot be excavated from any of the genres it falls into.
     What sets Wilder Girls apart, what I think will start to define the “New Weird” as we call it, is its marriage to (and, in a weird way, celebration of) the marginalizations of the cast. The book is comprised almost exclusively of women, two of the main cast, Hetty and Reese, are queer—something that Reese openly states outright, unprompted and unabashed. The body horror, then, starts to become indicative of both their individual characters (Hetty has something growing, squirming in her left eye; Byatt has two spines and a voice that threatens to rip her and anyone around her to shreds when she speaks; Reese has glowing hair a hand turned reptilian by scales and claws) and of the varying oppressions that bind them to each other.
     It exists counter to the messages of a lot of YA fiction, which usually preaches the importance of biological family, of aspirational hope. Wilder Girls does none of that. Instead, the girls develop an undying devotion to each other. It seems to offer that, in a world that puts you in danger, one that is falling apart at the seams, the best you can do is cling to those who appreciate you unequivocally. They see the beauty in each other’s weird, they accept and embrace it. Keep each other from falling apart.
     The Tox, as its called, becomes both a representation of the world’s own falling apart —Raxter Island is mutated beyond recognition by the same disease that mutates the girls—as well as being something that the world is not yet ready for. Be that the girls' loudness, their cunning, their queer.
     I don’t think there is a better subject matter through which to identify the New Weird than the queer. I think that moving forward, focus on these types of marginalized experiences will be what defines the subgenre—look at Get Out or Us. The weird in them is married to the Black. That is where the Weird is going. It’s reaching into the margins and queering the horrors that are already present within them.

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