A WILD REGION: Tales and Stories from the Heartland by Robin Lee Lovelace – Contemporary American Gothic, Short Story Collections, Weird Fiction

A Wild Region: Tales and Stories from the Heartland by Robin Lee Lovelace is a wonderful collection of Weird fiction (emphasis on Weird), showcasing the oddities and fantastic adventures which hide among the everyday people of the midwestern United States.

Lovelace opens with ‘Virgie’s Headless Chicken’, setting the tone for the full collection as Virgie attempts to reproduce a circus sideshow act. Lovelace shares her familial inspiration for this story in a fascinating preface.

From there she gifts readers with the award-winning novella, Savonne, Not Vonny, a coming-of-age story of a little girl involving brothels, voodoo, and displaced gods. Savonne faces trial after trial as she grows up in different environments, all while she tries to understand her place in the world. This setting is particularly well-developed, leaving readers wanting more from even the secondary characters. Readers who loved Neil Gaiman’s American Gods will enjoy every page of Savonne’s adventures.

Varying in emotion and impact, all of these tales will grab a reader’s attention. In every story of A Wild Region, fully-realized characters deal with important problems, approaching them with their own strange solutions.

A Wild Region, as a whole, deals with themes of belonging. Some stories explore belonging to a family, be it blood or found. Others in relation to society. No matter how strange and fantastic the setting and circumstances, the characters drive each story. Even the most bizarre elements are secondary to the characters, enhancing their journey. Readers will feel for each protagonist, rooting for them to the end.

This collection will help readers see their own surroundings with a new curiosity.

Every one of these stories takes place in the mundane, real world, tucked away somewhere at the edges of daily life with ties to the South and Midwest United states. From a southern Indiana farmhouse in the 1940s on to an abandoned mansion in a virus-ravaged Memphis in 2041, readers will look twice at roadside attractions and dusty drives which lead into the unmitigated wilds of this continent, questioning their hidden mysteries.

Lovelace is a strong voice in contemporary Weird and Southern Gothic fiction whom readers should continue to watch for. Hopefully, she has many more fantastic scenarios and characters yet to share with the world.

Included in this collection, Uncle won the 2021 Marguerite McGlinn short story competition and Savonne, Not Vonny by Robin Lee Lovelace won Grand Prize in the 2020 CIBA Shorts Awards for Short Stories, Novellas, and Collections.