Her fiction won the Story Foundation Prize, received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, and appears in The Missouri Review, Story, Joyland, Fatal Flaw, and translated to Italian in Spazinclusi. Her translations appear in World Literature Today and The Apple Valley Review. Born in San Angelo, TX, she's lived in New Orleans and now lives with her husband in New York City. Sister Creatures is her debut novel.
At Electric Lit Green tagged "ten books, all published within the last decade, feature some sort of entity or presence that looms over the lives of their characters, and they’re all incredibly enjoyable reads." One title on the list:
The Need by Helen PhillipsRead about another book on the list.
I have a theory that every one of us contains a doppelgänger story, and Phillips’s is one of the best. Molly, a paleobotanist and mother of two small children, worksin a fossil quarry called the Pit, where, in addition to ancient plant life, they discover objects that are just slightly…off: a Coca-Cola bottle with the wrong font, a plastic toy soldier manufactured with a monkey’s tail, a wrongly-shaped Altoids tin, a Bible with one conspicuous alteration. The Bible in particular brings more visitors and more funding to the Pit, but it also brings a fair share of hostility. These work stresses bleed into Molly’s home life, where an unwelcome presence enters and threatens the wellbeing of her children. With one of the tensest openings I’ve ever read, The Need explores the bewilderment and dread of motherhood, of caretaking, of being responsible for such tiny, vulnerable bodies.
The Need is among Clare Beams's nine titles about haunted motherhood, Chin-Sun Lee's five top gothic novels about distressed women, Ainslie Hogarth's eight novels about monstrous mothers, Amanda Mactas's five top horror novels driven by maternal instinct, Michael J. Seidlinger's top ten terrifying home invasions in fiction.
--Marshal Zeringue
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