Wilder Girls

Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror

'Man, smell those trees! Smell those Douglas Firs!'

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In this episode we discussed Wilder Girls, the 2019 novel by Rory Power.

If you want to follow us on twitter we are @stillscaredpod, and our email address is [e-mail]. Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her work at her website, and new music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com.

Transcript

Ren Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books films and TV. I’m Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Whybray and today we’re talking about Wilder Girls by Rory Power, from 2019. And just so you’re aware, we read an extract in this episode that includes some pretty strong body horror, so take that as you will. Enjoy!

(theme tune plays)

Ren Good afternoon, Adam!

Adam Good afternoon Ren, how are you feeling?

Ren I am underslept, and I managed to just spill milk all over my kitchen, but otherwise I am alright!

Adam Was it dairy milk?

Ren It was, I’m making milk kefir in my latest fermenting projects —

Adam I didn’t know you had fermenting projects!

Ren Oh yeah, this is my new thing, one of my pandemic hobbies is fermenting. So I’ve been making kombucha and sauerkraut and all kinds of things, and now I’m onto kefir.

Adam That’s exciting, obviously not the spilling onto the floor, that’s a bit sad.

Ren But yes, it’s a very good hobby, I’m enjoying it a lot. It combines cooking and science and leaving things in jars and it’s kind of gross, and kind of fascinating and also you get to eat stuff!

Adam I can see all of that appealing to you! I’ve been doing my volunteering this morning at the local primary school which involves me listening to children read. Occasionally I’ll try to sneak in some Ursula LeGuin, so I’ll bring in a copy of Catwings and if they don’t have a book I’ll say ‘Here, Catwings!’ and get them to read that.

It’s nice to hear a variety of different children’s books, and the kids are very endearing. They say some interesting things, one of the girls last week, we were reading this book — I don’t know if it was self-published — but an autobiography by a guy who painted elephants in Africa, I’d never heard of him. But he sets off to Africa, paints some elephants and this autobiography had some bits about his childhood and some photos, and it had a photo of him as a baby.

And obviously, being a baby, he was naked. And the girl says ‘Oh, that’s a bit rude, the baby’s naked’. And I said ‘Well, it’s a baby, we’re all born naked’ and she said ‘Maybe we should be born wearing clothes’, and I said, ‘Well, I don’t know who would put the clothes on the baby in the womb. I don’t know how that would work.’ And then she thought about it and said ‘Well, in a way skin is kind of a human’s clothes’, and I said ‘That’s very interesting and creepy’, which she wasn’t offended by, I think she agreed.

Ren A children’s horror fan in the making, there.

Adam Yeah, I thought so. And otherwise, I’ve been watching — well, I’d previously been vert wary of Britbox, because as my step-daughter said it seems very nationalistic, like ‘We have the best TV’ Brexit-y kind of thing. But when me and Antonio tried moving to the Netherlands we got Britbox, thinking it might give a sense of home and be comforting. Actually, we didn’t watch any in the Netherlands, we watched some Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads. But we realised that Antonia had still been paying for it so we thought we’d better watch some of it.

And obviously I was drawn to the old children’s TV programmes, and I’ve rediscovered Whizziwig! Do you remember Whizziwig?

Ren I don’t think so, though maybe if you describe it you’ll jog my memory.

Adam Right, so it’s written by Malorie Blackman, the same writer as Noughts and Crosses, so a respectable kid’s writer. And Whizziwig is an alien, who looks a bit like a pink disembodied skull, covered with some mottled fur. The puppet looks a bit like it’s been found in the trash, looks kind of dirty. And she’s got these tiny ineffectual hands sticking out from the bottom of her head, and she flies.

If you can imagine a decapitated bush baby with tiny dolls hands grafted to its underside —

Ren — Yes, I’m looking at a photo now and that seems accurate.

Adam Is this jogging any memories?

Ren No, I don’t think I encountered Whizziwig.

Adam Yeah, my brother and sister don’t remember Whizziwig either, so maybe I was one of very few viewers at the time. But the gimmick with Whizzwig is that she grants wishes, but monkey-paw style, they’re only wishes you don’t want to come true, particularly inadvertent wishes.

So if you say, like the little boy in it: ‘I wish for a new bike’, Whizzwig has this irritating, slightly smug passive-aggressive voice, and she says:

(Clip from Whizziwig: ‘You know it doesn’t work like that Ben, I can’t grant wishes that you wish for yourself’.)

But then if you make an accidental wish, if you’re like: ‘God, I wish it wasn’t so hot’, Whizziwig is like ‘Aha’ and will make everything freezing cold, or whatever. Early on, Ben’s mum is talking about the neighbour and she says: ‘I wish she did have two tongues!’ and then she grows another tongue and starts screaming because she has another tongue in her mouth.

Ren That’s… fairly demonic.

Adam Well, that’s the thing! Whizziwig makes it very clear early on that she basically harvests wishes to reconstruct her spaceship. She’s landed on Earth and she needs to eat wishes to refuel her spaceship. So she only sees humans as batteries. She clearly has no other interest in humanity apart from to restore her craft.

And probably the most disturbing episode, which is awful really, is one where there’s this bully who is played by a kid who looks about ten years older than the rest of the class, he’s a bit like Jimbo in The Simpsons. Looks like he’s been held back. So no wonder he’s unhappy. And some of the kids say: ‘I wish you would turn into a donkey, so the teacher can see what a stupid donkey you are!’ and when Whizziwig hears a wish she goes (Clip from Whizziwig) ‘Ahh’. And then these stars come out of her eyes and the wish is granted. So this kid does turn into a donkey.

And then, because sixteen kids wished it, it’s going to take sixteen days for Whizziwig to turn him back into a human, so Ben goes to the teacher, really worried about what’s going to happen to the donkey, and she says: ‘Well, the RSPCA are going to have to pick the donkey up’ and he says: ‘What happens then?’ and she says, ‘Well, hopefully someone will adopt him, but if not they’re going to have to put him to sleep’. And he’s like: ‘How long will that take?!’ and she’s like: ‘I don’t know, about two weeks maybe’ so Ben’s like: ‘Whizziwig! You said it would take sixteen days! He’s going to get put to sleep! We’re going to be murderers Whizziwig!’ And Whizziwig just says: (Clip from Whizziwig) ‘Put to sleep, that sounds nice’ and then goes to sleep, smiling. And Ben’s like: ‘Whizziwig no!!’. Whizziwig does not give a damn!

Ren Yeah!

Adam It’s not quite a children’s horror, but it’s very committed to Whizziwig being very alien —

Ren — and having a complete indifference to human life.

Adam Yeah! And Ben’s clearly trying to protect Whizziwig and gets upset if she’s in danger of getting hurt, and considers Whizziwig a friend, and Antonia keeps saying: ‘I don’t think Ben’s realised that Whizziwig doesn’t care about him’. Whizziwig has no feeling for humanity, she’s just like ‘Oh, these batteries are interesting, I wonder what I can make them do?’.

I kind of recommend it. It’s on Britbox. So that’s a bit of a detour at the start of the episode, but I wanted to talk about it because it’s been giving me quite a lot of pleasure over the last week.

Ren I think that’s an honourable mention for the podcast, for sure.

Adam I’ve edited together a horror trailer for Whizziwig, so listeners if you go to YouTube and search for ‘Whizziwig horror’ I’m sure it will come up with my video and you can watch it and see what we’re talking about.

Anyway, that’s not what we’re meant to be talking about!

Ren No, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

But what we’re actually talking about is Wilder Girls which is a New York Times bestselling Young Adult novel by Rory Power from 2019.

Which was another one that I found for searching for ‘Young Adult Horror’ in my library app, alongside Out of Salem, and I thought it might be worth talking about.

It is set in an isolated girls’ boarding school called Raxter School for Girls, which is located off the coast of Maine, and Maine is on the North-Eastern tip of the United States, I had no concept of where Maine was.

Adam I had a vague concept that it was New England, which I associate with Kurt Vonnegut, I suppose.

Ren Maine seems to be right nudging up into Canada.

Adam So, forested and cold, I guess. Like in Twin Peaks, those Douglas Fir trees.

Ren Yes, absolutely. I think that’s the vibe we’re getting here. And it’s on this little island by itself.

When the story begins, the school has been in quarantine for eighteen months after being hit with an epidemic of the Tox, which is a horrible shape-shifting illness that has killed most of the adults, and made the woods and wildlife outside the school gate strange and dangerous, and transformed the bodies of the girls in the school with various mutations.

They’re sustained by meagre food deliveries from the army base on the mainland, but it’s only enough food to just keep them alive, and only the small group of girls designated as ‘Boat Shift’ are allowed to venture beyond the school gates to retrieve the deliveries, because of all the dangerous wildlife.

There are two remaining teachers, the Headmistress, who still retains some air of distant authority despite the transformation of the school, and Ms Welch, a younger teacher who has taken on the daily responsibilities.

Adam Inevitably, in my mind taken on the association of grape juice. I just imagine her carting around a carton of Welch’s grape juice at all times.

Ren Maybe replaced it with paraffin in the absence of actual grape juice.

Adam That would be more in keeping.

Ren The older girls have taken on new roles within the school — Boat Shift, and Gun Shift (who watch from the roof and shoot any animals who have been made wild with Tox and try to break into the school).

Those are the roles we know about, there’s probably others but those are the ones taken by our three main characters: Hetty, who has lost an eye to Tox, her eyes is —

Adam Gummied up.

Ren Yeah, gummied up and covered over with skin.

Adam Does she have a second eyelid?

Ren Oh yeah, maybe. There’s also her best friend Byatt who has grown a second spine, and the spikier, holds-herself apart Reese, who has a hand transformed into silvery scales.

The instigating incident for the book really is that Hetty is chosen to join Boat Shift over Reese, and when she goes beyond the gates of the school for the first time, she starts to ask questions about the Tox, where it came from and what the role of the girls in the school really is.

Yeah. And that’s kind of how the plot unravels, with Hetty and the other girls trying to get deeper into the mystery of what the Tox is and where it came from, and why it’s happening. We can get into it a bit as we go along.

Adam Yeah, what do you think of the premise? Because I’ve seen the inevitable comparisons to Lord of the Flies, but that doesn’t seem quite right to me. It almost seems closer to The Drifting Classroom than Lord of the Flies, because in Lord of the Flies there aren’t any teachers, whereas here there are still remnants of authority and at first they’re still trying to run the school as a school. And to be fair to the teachers in Wilder Girls, they do seem to be doing better than the teachers in The Drifting Classroom.

Ren Yeah, it’s the opposite to children being given over to wild nature, because they’re trying to keep it out at all costs, even though the wildness is in their bodies as well. The dynamic is very much about trying to keep a semblance of society and normality, even, going despite everything that has happened.

Adam Yes, I’d say it’s almost the flip side to Lord of the Flies, because if it’s an allegory about anything it’s more about repression, and institutionalised repression. With Golding and Lord of the Flies he clearly has a fear and mistrust around human nature and that left to their own devices children will become murderous savages, whereas I don’t think that’s what is going on here at all.

Ren It is about girls, and it is quite concerned with girls and the wildness and dangerousness about girls and teenage girls. But that’s very much within a framework of a very rigid and controlled laced-up boarding school setting.

Adam That reminds me that when I was reading this I kept thinking that I would be enjoying it more if it was a visual novel? I thought it would make a great visual novel or a video game.

Ren (laughs) I had the exact same note!

Adam That’s interesting, because to me if it recalled anything it was Japanese survival horror. There are bits that are weirdly similar to Resident Evil of all things, which I wasn’t expecting, but the body horror stuff really made me think of Nemesis in Resident Evil. But particularly the Playstation 2 era, Japanese survival horror games like Rule of Rose. It’s a bit of an obscure one, but it’s set in an all-girl’s boarding school, and it’s very much about the hierarchies within the school, and the power struggle between the girls and these strange demonic rituals.

And after I made this connection I ended up reading the second half of the book while listening to the Silent Hill 2 soundtrack. I genuinely think it improved it, it worked really well.

It has that chilliness and coldness that those kind of games have. Fatal Frame, maybe, Parasite Eve. But that era of Japanese survival horror kept coming to mind.

Ren The game that it reminded me of actually was a more recent one, which is Oxenfree.

Adam Ooh, yeah! I can see that!

Ren Which is a 2016 game, featuring a group of teenagers on a little island, having odd supernatural experiences and trying to puzzle out what’s happening. And that making that comparison made me wish that Wilder Girls was a game instead of a novel.

Adam Okay, it’s nice to hear that you had a very similar thought process.

Ren Yeah, I think it’s because the plot is fine, but the thing that is very vivid and exceptional about the book is the way that Power describes the transformation of the island and the wildlife and the girls all as a piece. And I could just imagine a game where you’re wandering around this island where things have changed and become strange and dangerous and you’re trying to find out what’s happened.

The setting is so immersive and rich —

Adam — And you want to walk through it. You want those walking sim experiences. It also reminded me in terms of the school politics of Black Closet, if you know that one?

Ren No.

Adam It’s another, I guess queer-coded? I’m not that far into the game so I don’t want to speak to that, but I think there are lesbian relationships in the game. But it’s a visual novel which is all around being the top girl, or prefect and you have this team of prefects under you that you have to use to keep the school in order and nip any scandals in the bud.

Ren Yeah. I think this is probably kind of way I enjoyed this book more on a first read and struggled to engage with it on a re-read. Because on a first read, even if I didn’t find the plot particularly compelling, the setting and description carried me through, but on a re-read not being very interested in the plot bogged me down.

Adam Yeah, I can see that. I think I bounced off Hetty as a main character. I think she would work really well as a playable character in a game, but I just found her a little bit of a blank slate. Especially compared to Reese and Byatt, her friends, who I found more interesting. And sometimes the narrative voice changes to Byatt and I preferred those chapters.

Ren Yeah, Byatt’s a bit more of an interesting proposition, right? She’s got a bit more of an edge to her than Hetty, who does feel quite passive.

Adam Yeah, a lot happens to her. Which is fine, potentially, particularly in a horror novel but I just feel like we spend a lot of time with Hetty’s first-person narration and we never really get much of a sense of her beyond her wants and desires. We have a clear sense for her strong feelings around Byatt, and her strong feelings for Reese, and outside of that I don’t really feel like I know her at all.

Ren Yeah, it’s interesting isn’t it?

Adam And that meant, again, if I was playing her as a character and she was more of an avatar that would be okay. I’ve been playing Planescape Torment for the first time because you can get it on the Xbox, and the main character in that is a complete cipher and sometimes that’s frustrating but it’s fine, because you’re slotting into that role.

But I guess I was looking forward to the Byatt chapters because I preferred her narrative voice.

Ren And the thing that happens with Byatt is because their infections come in waves, and they say ‘I’m getting a flare-up’ and they get a new symptom and they never know what it’s going to be. So when Byatt gets her second one it’s her voice, which starts to hurt her and hurt everyone who hears it.

And she gets taken away from the school and taken to the camp that’s… is the camp off the island or hidden on the island?

Adam I was also confused by that. Because they seem to think that the camp’s on the island, and then they obviously go to this hut that used to be Reese’s house, or Reese’s dad’s house… but I don’t know if it’s made clear.

Ren I think it is on the island, but it’s far away from the school and out of the way. And they take girls there, sometimes, to do tests on them and try to figure out what the Tox is. And they take Byatt there.

Adam And it’s interesting reading this — I was going to say post-Corona but with Omicron it’s very much still going. I had it over Christmas, the second time I’ve had Covid. I guess I’d say get vaccinated, because I know they say Omicron is less severe and tends to set up shop around the throat rather than really getting into the lungs in the same way, but I would say it was far less severe than when I had it early on.

The first time, nearly two years back, the exhaustion was ridiculous, I was getting out of breath going up and down the stairs. Whereas whatever I had over Christmas, and I had positive tests back, felt more like a severe cold. And obviously if I was compromised in other ways that could still be very serious. My brother, having very bad athsma is still being very careful. But I do suspect it was because I’ve had both injections and the booster.

Ren And already been infected.

Adam Yeah, so it wasn’t so bad. But I found it interesting reading this, because I’m not saying it’s an anti-vaxxer book, it’s not, but I can imagine reading it as an anti-vaxxer and finding it very resonant and maybe taking that away from it.

Ren Ah, the anti-science take you could get from it.

Adam Yes! The villains of the piece are those who are trying to research the virus and develop a vaccine, and who are using humans as test subjects.

Ren Yeah!

Adam So I’d be interested to know if it has been reviewed or read by anyone who does hold that opinion or viewpoint, because I can imagine that being resonant. I don’t think that’s the intention, obviously, but it’s just a book that is going to be read differently in a post-Covid world.

Ren Yeah, because there’s an undercurrent of the Tox being… that it’s not just a disease that happens to be happening to these girls, but that it’s unlocking something within them, and that there’s some kind of power within them that the Tox is latching onto. It’s a bit ambiguous, because it’s obviously destructive but there is a part of it that gives them this power and transformation in ways that isn’t always wholly bad.

Adam Oh yeah, it seems like it’s being loosely mapped onto hormonal changes, or emergent sexuality. It’s loose. It’s not like there’s a clear one-on-one correlation, but it is definitely linked to adolescent development, particularly teenage girls.

I’m not quite sure what it’s doing with that apart from maybe trying to connect with how it feels. So it’s connecting with the experience of going through those hormonal changes, and how that feels emotionally, and maybe also on a physical and chemical level.

I don’t know if it’s making a political or social point through that, or if it’s just trying to connect with young adult readers who might find that quite resonant.

Ren Yeah. Shall we do Texture of the Week?

Adam Yeah, okay! I’m running out of objects.

Ren and Adam (Tapping and shaking noises) Texture… of… the… week!

Adam coughs That was a bit much for me.

Ren Do you want to go first?

Adam Okay. It’s just as simple one but that I thought was rather neat. As you mentioned, the Pox? -the Vox? - the Tox! It’s like a Doctor Seus story. But the Tox has this effect on the wildlife as well as the girls, so the bears and deers are also transformed. And there’s a nice little description where Hetty comes across a deer about 2/3 into the book, and its veins are described as standing out like a pattern in lacing. And I found that really evocative, it’s a beautiful but grotesque image.

Ren Yeah, mine’s similar. It’s the Raxter Blues/Raxter Irises.

The Raxter Blues are the crab that live on the island, and towards the start of the book Byatt grabs one from the pond and smashes it against the rocks, and Hetty narrates ‘starting at the very tip of its claws, the blue shell is darkening, turning black like it’s been dipped in ink’. When the Raxter Irises are picked, they too turn black, and now it’s happening with the girls as well, turning black up to their knuckles when they die.

Adam Nasty!

Ren Yeah! Euch! But I do like that environmental detail a lot.

Adam Some of the details also remind me of — did we read it together? Black Hole by Charles Burns.

Ren Yeah, we read it together in the Borders in York.

Adam Before it closed down because people like us just sat there reading comics without buying them.

Ren Yeah.

Adam I don’t know if it reminded you of that, with the teenagers with their body transformations.

Ren Yeah, I’m really surprised I didn’t make that connection but it very much is. Definitely.

Adam I think it’s also a bit like the director David Cronenberg wrote a young adult novel for teenage girls. Partly tonally, because it is a very cold feeling book. Which is interesting because a lot of it is about female friendship and desire, and romantic feelings but for all of that, I found it a very chilly book.

Ren It really is. The setting is chilly, and the whole atmosphere of it. It just feels uncomfortable, and draughty and cold.

Adam It’s also written with this emotional detachment. And that’s partly because Hetty as the protagonist gets increasingly emotionally hardened over the course of the book, and has to take some quite hard actions. And also it’s this idea of the viral or bacterial or parasitic transformations being positive in some way.

Because you get that in Cronenberg as well, whether in Shivers very early on where the parasite is revealed to be quite like the creature in Wilder Girls, this little worm-like creature that is making these changes. But it also made me think of The Fly, and how in that film Jeff Brundel when he’s turning into a fly at first sees it as a pretty sweet deal.

Ren Yeah, he’s swinging off the rafters.

Adam Eating loads of sugar and swinging off the rafters! Snapping people’s arms off while arm-wrestling them and stuff. So he simultaneously feels like he’s got this new power and this new freedom while also realising that it’s releasing something dark and amoral within him. There’s that great line in it when he says he’d like to become the first insect politician.

(Clip from The Fly: Jeff Goldberg’s character saying ‘I’d like to become the first insect politician’.)

Ren I’m glad I watched The Fly; I never want to watch it again.

Adam It’s a very goopy film. But there’s some very Cronenbergian goopy body-horror moments in this film!

Ren It rivals The Fly for pure disgustingness.

Adam Particularly this, I mentioned Hetty having to make hard choices but what’s a harder choice to make than — spoiler alert — having to kill your crushes Dad!

Ren Yes, so Reese is the one girl in the school who actually grew up in the island because her father was the groundskeeper of the school, but early in the Tox he wandered off into the woods and they didn’t see him again, until they go looking for Byatt in Reese and her Dad’s old cabin. Do you want to read that extract?

Adam

“I lift the shotgun, get ready to aim, but Reese shoves me away, looks up at me with a feral light in her eyes. Behind her, Mr. Harker advancing, step by step, vines unspooling from his mouth. “Don’t you dare,” she says, and her voice breaks open, raw underneath. “Please,” I say. “We have to run.” It’s too late. A vine writhes up Reese’s legs, along her spine, and another curls around her arm, jerks it back. A cry, and a crack of bone. Her right shoulder pops, hangs wrong in its socket. I lunge for her, grab my knife from my belt. Slash once, twice, at the vines holding her. Mr. Harker shrieks, rears back and drags her with him. “Hetty!” Reese yells. The shotgun. But when I fire into the heart of him, it makes no difference.

He only roars and pulls tighter on Reese’s arm, winds a vine around her throat and starts to squeeze. I could run. I could save myself and get back past the fence, back to the house. All I’ve got is my knife now. And what good is that against Mr. Harker? But there’s no choice to make. I break for him. Duck the thickest vine as it swings around, feel the thorns rip down my back, and there he is. I crash into him, and we tumble to the ground. Dirt in my mouth, the scrape of bark against my skin. My knife knocked from my hand, and I scramble for it across the damp earth. A vine locks around my ankle, yanks me onto my back. I graze my knife with my fingers, but it’s too far—I can’t—and he’s pulling me away. “Reese,” I call. “Get it!” But I can’t find her, can’t see anything but the looming dark as Mr. Harker bears down and his bruised hands, spongy with rot, close around my throat. I thrash, try to throw him off me, and his grip only tightens. Branches snake around my waist, holding me down. And one slithers up my neck, wrenches a scream from me as it hooks around my jaw and pries my mouth open.

I choke back a yell, and before I can move, a vine slinks up my back and knots around my neck. Squeezing tighter and tighter, splinters jabbing sharp, pain spilling across me in waves. But he’s weak now, blood pouring out of him. I grip the vine and break it in two. Fling myself back at him, his face pulling apart as his mouth opens wider and wider. I shove my hand deep into his chest again, bear down with my whole body until I hit what I think is bone. But a glimmer of the flare light, and they’re not bones. They’re branches, spindled ribs curving and cresting. I hook my fingers underneath them. Wedge my knee under his chin and pull, inch by inch. Until finally. A snap. And inside his rib cage, I see it. A beating heart, glossed in blood. Built from the earth, from the bristle of pine, and inside, there is something else, something more, something living. I don’t think twice. Just claw at it with both hands, and it comes screaming out with a wet tear.’

Mmmhmm, dee-licious!

Ren Urgghhhh. That’s pretty strong stuff!

Adam Strong stuff, it is! Probably some of the strongest stuff we’ve read on this podcast, actually.

Ren I think so, yeah. Eurhg.

Adam I don’t even know what you could content warn it for, to be honest, ‘mouldy tree horror’? It’s very strange.

Ren Yeah… err… mmm… real. Yeah. (Ren struggles for words to describe this)

Adam It’s very pungent, and I think it works because the book is so cold and clinical it doesn’t often break out into these adjective-heavy descriptive passages very often. So when it does, they really work.

Ren Yeah, how do you feel about how the body horror is used in this book?

Adam I mean, it’s the main stuff I enjoyed, if I’m honest. Because I didn’t really latch onto the main characters that much, I wasn’t as invested in their relationships as I wanted to be. I’m not saying I didn’t care at all, but I wasn’t as invested as I could have been. But the body horror stuff’s pretty effective! So when that comes that’s rather good, and I do like the Byatt chapters because she’s been sedated and put under and is coming back to consciousness they have this feverish quality. The writing becomes quite splintered and fragmented, and again I thought that was quite effective. How about you?

Ren I don’t know. I think the body horror is some of the most compelling parts of the book, and I think Power does it very well. I thought it might be interesting to compare it to Out of Salem, and how Schrieve had this quite different approach to body horror in that book, of approaching it from the inside, from Z’s perspective as the person who is falling apart. And then this is much more about the spectacle.

Adam Yes, I think Out of Salem is a more deeply empathetic book. I like it more, and I think that’s because the friendships and the feelings in Out of Salem really rang true for me. I was convinced by all of that, and I felt emotionally invested in these characters in a way that I didn’t, personally, with Wilder Girls.

Ren Yeah, I would agree.

Adam That might be because the nature of the book is quite repressed, the characters have been made to hold a lot in check and behave in certain ways, so there’s a lot of simmering tension which then breaks out in the body horror, I suppose.

Ren I did kind of relate to this — thankfully I didn’t go to a boarding school —

Adam — Thank heavens!

Ren But I did go to a pretty prim and proper girls school, and I think with the repressive atmosphere of that I can see parallels.

Adam Although that said, I do remember you saying that you and your friends took a frozen chicken or turkey on the Underground and sang songs about it. So I don’t know if you were entirely repressed!

Ren Yes, well. I wasn’t entirely on board. The young lady moulding didn’t entirely work.

Adam It sounds like you did a pretty good job pushing back against it. It sounds like there were antics.

Ren There were definitely antics, but I still think my experience of school and teenage friendships was quite emotionally cold, I think. So I kind of related to that in this book, but it also made me uncomfortable? I don’t know, it’s complicated. As an adult I relate much more to the relationships in Out of Salem.

Adam Yeah, that’s interesting. I mean, you’re probably more self-actualised in a lot of ways, right?

Ren Yes!

Adam And it’s like the girls in this book haven’t really had — I don’t necessarily mean the ‘privilege’ of self-actualisation, but it’s almost like they’ve been so focussed on survival that they’ve had to put their emotional development to one side, and they haven’t been able to spend much time looking inside of themselves because they’ve had to focus on where the next meal is coming from. Which is not to say that if you’re in a situation where you don’t have much food you can’t also do that work, but the way it’s written —

Ren — They’re very much reacting to what has been happening.

Adam Yeah, and there’s a lot of Hetty saying that things bought up certain emotions, but she doesn’t have time to deal with them. There’s a lot of that in the narrative voice. Which is maybe another reason why I think this might work better as a visual novel or a game.

But that’s my personal opinion, and clearly I’m in the minority here, right, because this is a really successful book! I know when I said at first that I’m not that keen, you were like ‘eh, don’t worry about it’. I’m not going to be affecting the sales.

Ren No, it’s done very well. So it’s clearly resonated with a lot of people. I was wondering if you were going to pick up on the element of climate-change horror in this book.

Adam Oh yeah! That’s interesting, because it’s there, but it’s very much folded into it. I’ve also seen comparisons between this and Jeff Vandermeer’s stuff like Annihilation, I haven’t actually read any, our mutual friend Ali has bought me some Vandermeer in the past, but I’ve never actually managed to get on and read it, but I’ve read the synopsis of his stuff and it seems similar, like climate change is there but not there. It gets mentioned, but it’s not the preoccupying concern.

There is the sense that the creatures on the island have already started adapting to climate change, and this is just another form of adaptation.

Ren Yeah, I’ve got a quote of where this comes up. It’s at the end of the book, where Reese and Hetty find the records that the scientists have kept:

‘I thought I recognised this,’ she says, and lays out the pieces of paper. Twin graphs, with analysis printed below in text so small I’d need a magnifying glass to make it out. ‘It tracks the climate,’ Reese explains, pointing to one axis where years are listed. The year of the Tox is highlighted on one copy, yellow ink faded and bleeding. ‘The average temperature on Raxter over time. Look, it goes way back.’ One copy in the school records, and another here in a makeshift hospital, pinned to Byatt’s bed. And there it is — the climate changing, the temperature rising. I read once about creatures trapped in the arctic ice. Prehistoric, ancient things, coming awake as the ice melts. In Maine, on Raxter, a parasite slowly reaching into the weakest things — the irises, the crabs — until it was strong enough to reach into the wilderness. Into us.’

Adam Now I’m just worrying about The Blob!

Ren Which Blob? The Blob that Ate Everyone?

Adam You know, The Blob. It creeps and seeps and glides and slides. The famous blob.

Ren The famous blob?

Adam The one that Monster Blood from Goosebumps is copying. It was a film in the 1950s and then again in the 1980s. But the way they defeat the blob is that they just get it to the Arctic and freeze it in ice.

Ren Ahh, it’s The Blob!

Adam That’s what people should be worrying about with climate change — when’s The Blob being de-thawed and allowed to get out!

Ren Yeah, I mean, are people paying attention to that?

Adam I don’t think so, but they should be.

Ren Makes you think.

Adam Maybe that’s what the next Extinction Rebellion campaign should be about, actually. I need to get back involved just so I can suggest that —

Ren — Trip to the Arctic, secure The Blob.

Adam But yeah, it’s got a good bear confrontation near the end, as well? Oh, there’s a horrible business with the scientists — the evil scientists — saying ‘Oh, when these girls are no longer useful as research subjects we’d better just kill them all’. So the Navy drop off a canister of poison, which the Headmistress then puts in the sprinkler system.

Ren Yeah, that was quite upsetting.

Adam I was quite surprised it went there, to be honest. That was the one bit of the book where I was like, ‘Oh, okay, that’s pretty horrific’. So it does have some pretty dark stuff in there. It’s very much a Young Adult book, but I wouldn’t really want pre-teens to read it. For instance, I maybe will recommend it to my step-daughter, but my 10 year-old stepson it would be too much for. It’s definitely a teenager’s book.

And I hope there is a film of it, actually because even though I have my reservations I think you could make a very good adaptation of it.

Ren Yeah, I agree. It’s such a moody setting, if you have a director who knows what they’re doing that could be great.

Adam Oh, you know who would do a great job? Lynne Ramsey. She could do an amazing adaptation. Have you seen any Lynne Ramsey? She did We Need to Talk about Kevin, and You Were Never Really Here, and Ratcatcher.

Ren No, I haven’t.

Adam She has this great combination of being very alive to textures, very sensory, but also very cold. Lynne Ramsey, if you’re listening to this podcast, which is astronomically unlikely, please adapt this!

Ren Ah, she’s a Glaswegian as well.

Adam She is! You should go round to her house.

Ren “Lynne Ramsey, I have an idea!”

I think that’s all my notes.

Adam It’s not that much fun. If I’m honest. Not that much fun.

Ren It’s not that much fun. I think that was also why I struggled re-reading it during the pandemic. Like, ‘this is a bit sad and horrible when everything’s a bit sad and horrible’.

Adam Yeah, if you compare it to other one’s we’ve done, say The Devil Walks, the Anne Fine one we did a while back, which had a ghoulish fun to it, or obviously Goosebumps or stuff like that, it’s pretty humourless, I would say.

Ren Yeah, it’s pretty serious! And body horror is something that often tips over into camp, right?

Adam Yeah, body horror is definitely one of the more scary forms of horror, because we all have bodies so it’s relatable. But a lot of body horror gets quite silly. I mean, Braindead’s a body horror.

Ren Exactly. So yeah, decide if you want to read this. If you want something a bit fun, probably not this one! If you want something that’s serious and textured and chilly and atmospheric, this might be for you.

Adam And I don’t know if we’re — because you wanted to keep it secret didn’t you, what we’re doing next?

Ren Yeah.

Adam Okay, we’ll keep it secret. But let’s just say that what we’re looking at next has managed to traumatise a whole generation of children.

Ren Yep, and you can draw your own conclusions from that.

Do you have a sign-off for us, Adam?

Adam Yeah — be wilder, creepy kids!

Ren Be wilder. Catch you next time.

Adam Bye!

Ren Bye!

(Outro music plays)