'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.
'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.'
Source : publisher's blurb
'Chloe Wilson is the author of two books of poetry, The Mermaid Problem and Not Fox Nor Axe. The latter was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in 2015 and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award in 2016. Hold Your Fire is her first collection of short fiction, and it is an assured and original debut. Bringing together a series of flash-fictions with several longer narratives, it showcases a sharp-eyed intelligence and a finely-tuned ear for rhythm and tone.' (Introduction)
'“They said: ‘Keep that boy at arm’s length’. But whose arm? The arm of an orangutan, a giant squid, a Tyrannosaurus rex?” These lines from Chloe Wilson’s short story collection Hold Your Fire could be a response to the standard advice given to girls on how to ward off unwanted sexual advances. It’s the kind of advice that puts the onus on victims, so that the body they’re trying to protect – their own – somehow, monstrously, becomes both predator and prey, a hostile, turbulent force that they must spend their entire lives keeping under tight control.' (Introduction)
'A series of beautifully controlled fictional voices and an exquisite sense of literary craft contribute to the dark magnificence of Chloe Wilson’s début collection of short stories, Hold Your Fire. This volume explores the strange and sometimes surprising abject horror that characterises the quotidian and the ordinary. The stories both examine and revel in the classically Kristevan abject realities of the body’s expulsions and the disgust that is often characteristic of social marginality. For example, the ‘poo phantom’ writes a ‘message in shit on the walls’; tampons wrapped in toilet paper are described as ‘bodies that needed to be shrouded for burial’; a character feels a ‘quiver down to the bowels, the rush that is equal parts excitement and dread’; another tries ‘to pass a kidney stone’; and two sisters try an ‘Expulsion Cure’, where the doctor asks how much they expel: ‘And how often? And what is the colour? The texture? … When you eat something – poppy seeds, say, or the skin on a plum – how long does it take to reappear?’' (Introduction)
'A series of beautifully controlled fictional voices and an exquisite sense of literary craft contribute to the dark magnificence of Chloe Wilson’s début collection of short stories, Hold Your Fire. This volume explores the strange and sometimes surprising abject horror that characterises the quotidian and the ordinary. The stories both examine and revel in the classically Kristevan abject realities of the body’s expulsions and the disgust that is often characteristic of social marginality. For example, the ‘poo phantom’ writes a ‘message in shit on the walls’; tampons wrapped in toilet paper are described as ‘bodies that needed to be shrouded for burial’; a character feels a ‘quiver down to the bowels, the rush that is equal parts excitement and dread’; another tries ‘to pass a kidney stone’; and two sisters try an ‘Expulsion Cure’, where the doctor asks how much they expel: ‘And how often? And what is the colour? The texture? … When you eat something – poppy seeds, say, or the skin on a plum – how long does it take to reappear?’' (Introduction)
'“They said: ‘Keep that boy at arm’s length’. But whose arm? The arm of an orangutan, a giant squid, a Tyrannosaurus rex?” These lines from Chloe Wilson’s short story collection Hold Your Fire could be a response to the standard advice given to girls on how to ward off unwanted sexual advances. It’s the kind of advice that puts the onus on victims, so that the body they’re trying to protect – their own – somehow, monstrously, becomes both predator and prey, a hostile, turbulent force that they must spend their entire lives keeping under tight control.' (Introduction)
'Chloe Wilson is the author of two books of poetry, The Mermaid Problem and Not Fox Nor Axe. The latter was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in 2015 and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award in 2016. Hold Your Fire is her first collection of short fiction, and it is an assured and original debut. Bringing together a series of flash-fictions with several longer narratives, it showcases a sharp-eyed intelligence and a finely-tuned ear for rhythm and tone.' (Introduction)
