Author(s): Chloe Wilson

Fiction | Mel M's Book Talkers

Dark and dangerous, brilliantly unsettling and chillingly funny, this extraordinary debut shows us what we usually deny - the uneasy truce we make with our ruthless desires and gothic fears, and how easily it can be broken. Prize-winning author Chloe Wilson's stories will pin you to the page.

'Chilling, funny, and razor sharp - a writer in control every step of the way. How I relished this extraordinary and original collection.' Sofie Laguna, Miles Franklin winner for The Eye of the Sheep

First published in Granta Magazine, the title story takes us into the cold war of a contemporary family: a missile-making mother doubts her husband's guts and the steel of her son, until a playground incident escalates and brings them into the most surprising of alliances. Needle sharp, effortlessly surprising and beautifully controlled, every story is transfixing.

A young couple move into a house in which there's been a recent murder, and fall under the spell of their peculiar, commanding neighbours. Two sisters are determined to detoxify themselves into perfection. A diver pushes herself and those around her to higher and higher jumps.  Interspersed with these transfixing tales are lightning strikes of flash fiction: we glimpse a leopard in the apartment next door; plants grown out of a strange and miraculous soil; the spirit of a girl who's been thrown down a well. At each turn, Chloe Wilson offers a unique insight, a tear in the veil of our comfortable moral certainties. Hold Your Fire exposes the battles we wage beneath the surface.

'['Tongue-Tied'] had me uncomfortably pinned by the end of the first paragraph, and squirming by the end of the first page ... add to that delicate balance an unusual point of view, two loaded relationships, and a sharp, subtle dose of humour, and I had to pick this story.' Rebecca Makkai, in choosing 'Tongue-Tied' to win the Iowa Review Prize.

'The stories in Chloe Wilson's Hold Your Fire are full of wit, intelligence, savage humour, and dark surprises. They combine the brilliant menace of Ottessa Mossfegh with the insight and control of Helen Garner; the result is a new Australian writer who made me feel less like a reader and more like a conspirator. I was transfixed.' Fiona McFarlane, author of Miles Franklin-shortlisted The Night Guest and The High Places

'These stories are wonderfully strange, complex yet funny; they are otherworldly and unearthly but at the same time an expression of how we live in the world right now. Chloe Wilson is the magician who by her art brings to light all we usually prefer to keep hidden.' Ceridwen Dovey, author of Only the Animals and In the Garden of the Fugitives  

CONSTANT READER STAFF REVIEW: MEL M

This is an enthralling read from the first story (a mere page-long wonder) right through 'til the end. There's always some 'filler' in short story collections, but none of these were like that. They were seriously just all that good. With crystallised, controlled prose, each story has just enough undulating suggestion and subtext to make the whole so much bigger than its parts; to make possibilities, moments and feelings kind of explode in your mind and lodge there.

I enjoyed the varied lengths and modes of the stories, and the sheer unpredictability of each one. Ultimately it was the uncanny believability of most of the stories that had me hooked, like Wilson has some sort of x-ray view into quite ugly and malformed parts of our psyche - which, exposed as they are in Wilson's fiction - become transformed, illuminated, and kind of magnificent. 

Hold Your Fire is definitely not a comforting read, but it's just perfect if you, like me, live for fiction that explores the dark, weird, odd and unexpected - with enough moments of levity and humour to balance things a bit.