[Review] Wilder Girls
Wilder Girls by Rory Power (2019)
Delacorte Press
5/5 stars
Content Warning: body horror, parental abandonment, parental death, starvation
Wilder Girls is the type of book that you’ll either hate or love; I haven’t seen any reviews where the individual didn’t have intense feelings regarding this novel. Personally, it was my favorite August read and will most likely be on my 2021 top five. The book more than surpassed my expectations and proved itself to be a great horror novel. Here we face one of the points that spark disagreement between the readers: many of them claim that Wilder Girls falls in the realm of fantasy rather than horror. I’m not sure how one could argue that a novel involving a deadly epidemic that causes monstrous mutations in teenage girls who’ve been quarantined in a boarding school on a tiny island as being anything other than horror. The problem is that there’s a popular misconception that horror equals scary, which not only reduces the field to something shallow, but also ignores the fact that different things scared each person.
The only aspect of this book that I disliked was the intense use of body horror that permeates the entire narrative. The author is very descriptive, and the mutations suffered by the characters are extremely gruesome. This is, of course, a personal problem and merely a warning that if you too are disturbed by body horror, this may not be the book for you (or just do what I did and skip the descriptive paragraphs). Said body horror was, as previously mentioned, courtesy of the mysterious disease that spread to all the girls in the boarding school and their teachers, who were all women. Since the school was the only thing on the island, they completely cut all the characters off from civilization and get their supplies delivered by boat from the Marines.
On top of that scenario, two of the characters are interested in each other; however, the romance between them is a minor element in the novel, which focuses instead on their quest to survive and how friendships can influence hierarchy. That influence is obvious within Wilder Girls, since the characters are in a situation similar to the one represented in Lord of the Flies, and even though they are led by the two remaining teachers, the girls do become “wild” (pun intended). Power vividly portrays how trauma and extreme situations affect human behavior, showing how merciless the girls had to become to survive the disease and the isolation from the world. Where Hendrix failed in The Final Girl Support Group, Power succeeded: her characters are at times rough, and violent, but the reader can’t help but empathize with them and root for their success.
Now we’ve reached the part of the book that can either make you want to throw it against a wall or display it lovingly on your shelf: the ending. Regarding the ending, if you’re the type of reader who wishes that all your questions are answered by the end of the narrative (and there’s nothing wrong with that, most of the time I’m like this myself), Wilder Girls will probably frustrate you. However, I believe that, by having an open ending, the plot becomes stronger and more plausible, whilst also leaving room for a sequel if Power turns Wilder Girls into a series. Even if she doesn’t, I’m still happy with the ending she provided because it fits well with the rest of the story. At no point did the characters, or the reader, have all the information, and that’s why the author could maintain a tense atmosphere and instil the feeling of imminent dread. The novel’s greatest strength is that it’s clouded in mystery.
