Big Bad - (Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction) by Whitney Collins (Paperback)

About the Book

In the stories of Big Bad, the mundane meets the mysterious, and the comedic collides with the catastrophic.

Book Synopsis

Within the thirteen stories of Whitney Collins's Big Bad dwells a hunger that's dark, deep, and hilarious. Part domestic horror, part flyover gothic, Big Bad serves up real-world predicaments in unremarkable places (motels, dormitories, tiki bars), all with Collins's heart-wrenching flavor of magical realism. A young woman must give birth to future iterations of herself; a widower kills a horse en route to his grandson's circumcision; a conflicted summer camper is haunted by a glass eye and motorcycle crash. Collins's cast of characters must repeatedly choose to fight or flee the "big bad" that dwells within us all. Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, and boasting a 2020 Pushcart-winning story, Big Bad simultaneously entertains and disconcerts.

Review Quotes

2021 IPPY Awards Gold Medal for Short Stories
2021 Foreword INDIES Bronze Medal for Short Stories
Publishers Weekly, "Books for Short Attention Spans 2021"
Electric Literature, "7 Magical Realism Stories from the American South"

"[Collins] lays on the verve and wit across the 13 stories in this crisp collection....[and] exhibits a contagious appreciation for the world's strange horrors, big and small."
--Publishers Weekly, online and print

"Beautifully written, wildly imaginative stories."
--Kirkus, online and print

"Kentucky author Whitney Collins begins her fantastic--and fantastical--story 'Lonelyhearts' like this: 'Lenora's first heart arrived in a box of Rice Krispies. It fell into her cereal bowl with a damp thud, and for a brief moment she mistook it for a hunk of roast beef.' And the story only gets better. Collins' story, full of literal hearts, is full of tenderness, loneliness, and love."
--Bradley Sides, Electric Literature, "7 Magical Realism Stories from the American South"

"Not a word is wasted in Big Bad, an unusual and masterful collection of short stories."
--Foreword Reviews starred review, online and print

"Offbeat, high-concept worldbuilding."
--"Books for Short Attention Spans 2021," Publishers Weekly

"[A] deliciously dark world in which anything is possible and the most horrifying is probable."
--"Big Bad' Pushes the Boundaries of Both Its Characters and Its Readers" by Kate Murphy, Southern Review of Books

"In her debut short story collection Big Bad, Whitney Collins showcases the emotion involved in making the most brutal of human decisions....Collins leads her characters to face a metaphorical precipice, with comfort items nowhere in sight. The view from the edge is new, splintered, and daunting. As readers, we look out into the abyss of possible outcomes....We find it peculiar that the characters make the choices they do. But that's what makes these stories so startling....Collins illuminates the very moments in a person's life when those close by would look away. Not because of the gore, but because looking would show us the things that make everyday life unbearable, and the desperation that confronts all of us when we choose something insufficient to cling to."
--"The Gore of Emotion: On Whitney Collins' Big Bad, " Cleveland Review

"[T]his collection is truly diverse but not for the sake of it; these are deeply felt, thoroughly realized explorations. Missing limbs, unborn babies, absent fathers, the cycle of death and birth (not necessarily natural in either case); there's repression, denial, the ache of loss, and of course LOVE (unrealized, unrequited, unwanted) pervades. And that's just scratching the surface of the riches contained within. . . . I recommend Big Bad with joy and urgency."
--1455, online

"Sparkling."
--Prevail, online

"Big Bad by Whitney Collins announces a voice as fresh as tomorrow morning. Darkly, subversively, hilarious stories carom along with brilliance and surety. In the title story of the collection, a woman gives birth to herself...over and over. In fiction both exquisitely bizarre and deeply satisfying, the excitement of discovery resounds throughout Collins' work."
--Leslie Daniels, author of Cleaning Nabokov's House

"What a raw delight of a book! Big Bad is precise, relatable, and also psychedelic and feral, taking me on side roads I never dreamed of traveling, delivering profound and humane truths that leave me stunned. While each story is supremely original, the collection reads like an instant modern classic, to be found on the shelf between Joy Williams and George Saunders."
--Jardine Libaire, author of White Fur

"To say that Whitney Collins has a unique voice is to make an understatement of massive proportions. Not only is she willing to go where other writers wouldn't even consider going, she seems to revel in the opportunity to bring us along for the ride--and how thankful we are that she does. To read her collection of sixteen stories, Big Bad, is to spend time with one of our most exciting new talents, a writer speaking to so many of the challenges of modern life: how to have healthy relationships, how to love after loss, how to forgive ourselves for crimes real and imagined, and how to envision a world--or a life for oneself--that does not yet exist. Each story holds a universe within it: humor that will make you laugh out loud; characters who will make you cry; lines that demand to be memorized. This collection creates a fictional landscape as meaningful as any imagined space I've dared to enter--one so real, so unflinchingly honest, I didn't realize I'd been transported, one so fascinating I didn't want to leave."
--Rachel M. Harper, author of Brass Ankle Blues and This Side of Providence

About the Author

Whitney Collins's fiction has appeared in Ninth Letter, The Southeast Review, Grist, The Pinch, Moon City Review, Quarter After Eight, The Laurel Review, Lumina, and Raleigh Review, among others. She is the recipient of a 2020 Pushcart Prize, a semifinalist for American Short Fiction's 2019 The Short(er) Fiction Prize, and her flash horror is forthcoming in Catapult's Tiny Nightmares anthology. Big Bad was the 2019 winner of Sarabande Books's Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Collins lives in Kentucky with her husband and two sons.