A new meaning to the idea of a toxic environment

[bloodygranuaile]

 I was supposed to do all kinds of admin stuff on Sunday but didn’t, because I was still existentially exhausted from Saturday, so instead I read the entirety of Rory Power’s YA sapphic body horror novel Wilder Girls in one sitting. 

 

With the caveat that at the time we were drinking some extremely extra craft stouts brewed in the tradition of “breakfast foods for bersekers about to sack Rome” so I don’t remember the conversation with perfect clarity, but we were talking about the Locked Tomb series and Vengeance Road and other stuff we’d read, and I mentioned that 2020 has sucked enough without slogging my way through any more heterosexual romantic subplots; I have read untold thousands of them since I first learned to read and I simply do not give a shit; for the rest of the year I am only reading fiction about goths, lesbians, and goth lesbians. (I do not know if books in which a girl falls in love with a tall dark and handsome house count as queer fiction, they probably don’t, but I’m allowing them anyway.) Anyway, somewhere between stouts I ended up with Lyndsay’s copy of Wilder Girls.

Wilder Girls is about a plague, which off the bat may seem overly timely and not quite the sort of thing one wants to turn to for escapism at the moment. The plague is, thus far, limited to a small island in Maine called Raxter Island, which features a bunch of woods, a small visitor’s center, and the Raxter School for Girls, which has been put under quarantine and now subsists off of supply drops from the U.S. Navy, which has cut off all communications except periodic notices to sit tight and wait for a cure, which the Navy is definitely working on and will surely have one of these days. The girls call the disease the Tox, and it hits everybody differently, but one of the common threads is that it causes all sorts of interesting mutations if it doesn’t kill you. Our narrator, Hetty, has had one eye fused shut by the Tox, and is pretty sure she can feel something growing underneath it. Her best friend and bunkmate, Byatt, has grown a second spine on the outside of her back. The third girl in their clique, Reese, has had one hand turned into a scaled claw, and her hair has gone luminescent or phosphorescent or something else radioactive-looking (but very pretty). The Tox doesn’t just affect humans; it has also done all sorts of interesting things to the flora and fauna on the rest of the island, rendering Raxter extremely dependent on the fences and gates separating it from the woods. 

 

The book opens about eighteen months after the Tox hits, and Raxter has settled into some sort of routine, in a militarized, scarcity-driven sort of way. One of Hetty’s roles in quarantine is that she’s on Gun Crew, essentially armed guards that cover Boat Crew. One of the inciting incidents of the plot involves some personnel changes in Boat Crew, the only group that is allowed to leave the school to go pick up the supply drops from the Navy. With the Boat Crew switchup, Hetty comes into some information suggesting that the Navy’s relationship with Raxter might not be quite what they say it is.

 

The other big inciting incident of the plot is that Byatt has a flare-up, and then goes missing. Hetty knows she didn’t just die, because all the girls who die are burned and buried publicly (or what passes for “publicly” when your entire community is quarantined), and she’s not in the infirmary, so Hetty decides to figure out where she is. Reese gets in on this objectively bad idea of an adventure as well, which is a little awkward because Hetty is doing it for Byatt but Reese is doing it for Hetty. 

 

As readers we get to know somewhat more about where Byatt is because there are also several chapters from Byatt’s viewpoint, although there’s still things we don’t know, because the Navy research center that Byatt is being held in also refuses to tell Byatt key information like “what research center is this and where is it located.” Byatt spends her days being doped up on diazepam and answering a lot of questions from a Dr. Paretta and a very nice young Navy medical assistant named Teddy, whom I suspected was a goner the moment he showed up being nice. Teddy is not very genre-savvy and does not understand that he is in a body horror story and not a romance; Byatt, somewhat unconscionably, does. 

 

Back over at Raxter School, Hetty and Reese are trying to unpick several mysteries at once, including figuring out what happened to Reese’s father--formerly the groundskeeper, and the only man on the island when the Tox hit--and what their one remaining adult teacher, Ms. Welch, is up to, given all her secret talking on the phone with the Navy and sneaking around with the one girl who quit Boat Crew. Similar questions surround Headmistress, the only person over 30 left alive on the island. The particular plot threads are less important than the general suffocating atmosphere of secrets and lies they help build, a creepy addition to an already wonderfully creepy atmosphere of abandonment, unnatural nature, and mutated teenagers. Something about the Tox doesn’t seem to take well to adults or males--something with how it interacts with hormones--leaving the youngest girls unscathed until about 13, the teachers dead, and the teenage girls increasingly changed in painful and terrifying ways. 

 

I just… love it? A lot? The contained post-apocalyptic mini-universe of Raxter Island, the tiny threads leading outwards from it that Hetty and her friends pull on like a ratty sweater until the whole thing unravels, the cold hard bonds of friendships forged in trauma that are almost completely lacking in warmth but nonetheless earth-shakingly powerful, the underexplored hints at bigger stories, the political underpinnings about climate change and elite faithlessness. It’s absolutely riveting.