(Reviews of The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste are on a separate page; to order any of these books, see the Fabularetail page.)

The Hungry Girls and Other Stories … takes us into a landscape at once awful, fantastic and darkly familiar. … Patricia Eakins's territory is in that tangled thicket of the imagination somewhere between Borges and Burroughs, between the fairy tales of Grimm and the magic realism of the South Americans, a kind of "Invisible Cities" as animal sanctuary. … The Hungry Girls is about the primordial universe unmediated by the civilized and the rational, but it is also implicitly about the imagining of self-sustaining worlds, the making of convincing artifice. … Ms. Eakins's imaginary creatures have a visceral reality as powerful and convincing as the human characters in most of our realistic fictions. … Nature in Patricia Eakins's densely rendered universe is both evenhanded and arbitrary. The Hungry Girls gives us a dimly familiar version of our world, as perceived through a transforming imagination. It is a work of imaginative brilliance, a considerable achievement in modest disguise. … Readers interested in the pleasure of surprising fictions will go out of their way to find … Patricia Eakins's triumphantly quirky first book.

A stunning mixture of mythology, surrealism, anthropology and nature, the thirteen stories in this collection are a tour-de-force of originality, imagination and style. From story to story, Eakins invents a fantastic bestiary which resembles at times the gentle and wise creation myths of primitive tribes and at others the dark sociological satire of Swift and Rabelais. These stories … exhibit a finely-honed, carefully constructed anti-realism; … a kind of attack on the highly conscious, rational, dualistic, scientific thought processes common to Western thinking in the modern age. The author seems to argue, with justification, that imagination and the unconscious are doors to understanding that have rusted shut on their hinges as a result of our over-reliance on reason. Borrowing from any number of conventions both sacred and profane, from contes fantastiques to creation myths to traditional Japanese courtier tales, these stories seek to provide, like the myths and fables they often emulate, explanations for mysteries beyond the kinds of knowing fostered by scientific thought. These refreshing and original stories leave me aching for more of the same. The Hungry Girls is quite simply one of the most intriguing and entertaining new collections of short fiction I have read in recent years.

One of the characters in Patricia Eakins's first collection, The Hungry Girls and Other Stories, talks of stepping into books, "`there to enjoy a universe that is our own in all its perfection.'" That universe is her own book, actually a bestiary. … The territory may be akin to the work of Harold Jaffe or tangentially even to that of Kathy Acker or William Burroughs, but it is yet very much Eakins's own, imbued with an ecological "fitness" that is one of the many strengths of the collection. … Eakins's skill lies in writing a fairy tale full of childlike wondrousness, capable of allaying the "grown-up's" skepticism, yet still preserving the cynicism and defeat that is our adult lot. … In many in these stories, Eakins is willing to cover vast tracts of time to show us the human capacity for absurdity or decadence on a panoramic scale … and we laugh at … fallibility … which is really our own. We laugh a lot in this book [at] digressions … luscious and revealing and thus not digressions at all. Much of the imaginative richness of the collection comes from what might be called an anthropo-logical plausibility … but it is more: the weaving of ritual into the lives of fictional characters. …

I give testament to Eakins's ability to bring … impossible beings to life. There's a totality to these creatures and their habits that makes them arresting beyond their inherent freakishness. What the sophisticated reader culls from these tales of mythological animals … is twofold: as is said of a man in the title story: "he had been long enough among the animals to have forgotten the ways of people." The readers of this collection are in essence reminded that the reverse is also true. Eakins's bestiary is territory that I doubt can be approached again without repetition, but showing the imaginative capacity that she does, whatever direction she chooses to take next must be awaited with anticipation. Here she shows the beast and beauty in ourselves, not only how ordinary our humanity but also how mundane our beastliness.

. … textes étonnants. … le monde inquiétant de The Hungry Girls constitue un bestiare inégalé par quelqu'autre imagination que je connaisse. Ovide n'est jamais loin non plus, ni la mythologie dont il se fit le chantre. … Dans le solde des nouvelles stupéfiantes de ce recueil, Eakins creé un monde de mythologies brutes qui, sous couvert de pseudo-ethnographie, de pseudo-mythographie et de pseudo-biologie substituent une réflexion sur les métamorphoses des fins à l'énoncé poétique des métamorphoses des origines dont Ovide se fit le plus célebré narrateur. L'itinéraire ne va plus de la création du monde et de Titans à l'apothéose de Jules César: ou bien il prend sa source dans le génétique le plus élémentaire pour s'aller perdre dans le post-apocalyptique, ou bien il inscrit le parcours de Méandre-aux-eaux-sinueuses dans les imprécis marais d'un passé archéologique ou préhistorique. Dans cet univers chronologiquement flou mais graphiquement sans ombre, ce monde incertain des mutations et des évolutions animales, Eakins demande au rêve d'assister un patrimoine génétique en fluctuation. Le cadre temporel est d'avant la mémoire, lieu pétri d'immanence et d'imminence à la fois, "awesome" et menaçant: monde de la Genèse, de la mitose, des oeufs, de la semence et du gène, de la vie qui ne sait être encore que mystère et incertain devenir. Si thématiquement, dans "Salt" comme dans "The Change", "Banda" ou "Meat Song," règne l'ombre de l'Oncle Ovide, c'est a' l'Oncle Beowulf et à l'Oncle Ezra que se doivent les cadences et les sonorités saxonnes d'une langue concassé qui chant le mineral, le primitif, le cellulaire, le primordial. De ces thèmes et de ce chant, sourd une manière d'érotisme ou de sensualisme primaire où dominent le reproductif, un élan du vivant de l'ordre de la faim, de l'instinct, de l'entêtement à demeurer, à persévérer dans l'être, quelle que soit sa forme.

C'est le temps des nominations hésitantes, sans transcendance, de la division primale, d'une distinction sexuelle laborieuse, de la séparation des eaux et de la terre, du blanc et du jaune de l'oeuf, le temps du sevrage de la terre-mère des origines, le temps du vouloir-vivre. Dans cet univers mi-entropique mi-proliférant, s'entend le chant des espèces, s'observent les variations des gènes et les métamorphoses des oeuvres d'un créateur-artiste suprême, et l'on pourrait décrire ce lyrisme de la vie monstrueuse et de beautés fantastiques de l'inconnaissable comme un oratorio chromosomique.

Like some of the best poetry, these tales dazzle and amuse us with their inventiveness, love of paradox, and skill with language.

… What we have in this collection is the birth of a North American female Borges — mental, clever, all puzzles and riddles, lit as chess, mind-trek, with this difference … whereas Borges is centered in dream, myth, the occult, the focus of Eakins is fantasy-biology in its widest sense. The whole book is visioned through the naturalist's eye — only (like Borges) this naturalist is just a little surrealistically off center. Delicious writing, a kind of fantastic bestiary. It has the bronze solidity and permanence of major work. … Romping through all-history, all-geography, turning her fantastic animals into sociological paradigms (Cf. Gullivers Travels or Melville's Mardi), working out absurd sociological models with utter tongue-in-cheek sobriety. … Eakins has thrown a puzzler at us that more than anything else announces the beginnings of the major phase of a major artist among us.

Patricia Eakins must have grown up on bestiaries because every story in her new collection is about some sort of made-up animal, and like the medieval writers, she is very moral about her creatures, except in her case the morals tend to be a little disturbing.

The Hungry Girls is an astonishingly ambitious and accomplished book, especially considering the risks Patricia Eakins takes. Writing in the genre of the fabulous tale, she stakes a claim in territory pioneered by … Rabelais, yet her work reveals a distinctive and often startling sensibility. The strength and resonance of many of Eakins's stories come from her deft use of the shocking. … At times the fantastical is no more than we might see on the evening news. … Eakins sometimes casts a devastatingly cold eye on what human culture accepts as normal. … Eakins apparently believes in our need for story to make the world come alive again. Even her most fantastical stories are tales of the human condition.

The Hungry Girls should be just a bestiary. … Instead it is a gift of unconstrained storytelling, a vigorous imagination striding … through the awful, brutal necessities of biology which has this terrifying effect: Eakins makes us cringe at the rebellious nature of our own flesh, caught between our puny wishes and the needs of the species. … The Hungry Girls is among the most original and unsettling books I have ever read. … The tales are constructed with surprising, even astonishing turns. There is nothing floating or disconnected about her voice. She is deeply engaged, passionately observing the worlds that her imagination has about the real world. This book is the Smithsonian of the imagination, only better. … Eakins is so deft, she ranges across forms, using each to exactly fit her tale. … And yet these stories are never quite a form … but remain images evoked … so the reader walks away with a powerful image, his nightmare still intact. …

These stories … are dark, even malevolent in their power to evoke horror, but Eakins achieves these effects with a brilliant mixture of humor, sometimes so outrageous you laugh out loud, and poetic turns that make the language sing with rhythms and resonances that are comforting, calming, and enthralling, in the same moment she makes you gasp. Eakins's passion does not derive from a description of what she sees … but from a furious, at times ecstatic, attempt to comprehend an awesome universe.

… Patricia Eakins tells thirteen tales of primal, disturbing beauty in an authoritative voice that is both scientific and lush. Under the guidance of this storyteller, we suspend our old ways of seeing and enter a mythic landscape where the perverse becomes redemptive and the macabre becomes natural. Eakins's tales … strip away sentimentality to reconnect us with old truths and to reveal the world as it is: graced, mysterious, and brutal. … Eakins's book yields an astounding menagerie of life. Parable, epic, folklore, fairy tale, saga -- the teller houses her vision in each of these forms to pass on a collection of wisdom that is rare in this age of information.

Comments on the story "The Hungry Girls"
when it appeared in Storia 4: Green, edited by Kate Figes
London, England: Pandora, 1990

Above all, watch out for Patricia Eakins's extraordinary grotesquerie, "The Hungry Girls," lifted by Storia from an earlier American collection. …

Another memorable moment is provided by cult American writer Patricia Eakins. …

Pre-Publication Comments on The Hungry Girls and Other Stories

On the chapbook Oono I-74 Press: Carrboro, NC, 1982

I like the humor in [her] work. I like its declarative, maybe I mean authoritative, quality. And of course I like the tone, the middle ground between ancient zoology text and fairy tale (though that doesn't quite do it justice). In Oono particularly, I was impressed by the focus on both an individual and a society. I don't know where I've encountered that kind of sweeping concern outside of Homer. And I like the sense of perpetual motion — I like that very much — the sense that even seemingly odd or random occurrences have a firm, but mysterious, connection. The large view of the world also gives the sense that these stories are in progress, and will continue to be, at any and every given moment.

… her chapbook Oono is a distinct and pleasing departure. Her seemingly effortless skill at making myths-in-progress is stunning. A unique intelligence.

Patricia Eakins takes risks. … Oono … is delightfully free and open. Patricia Eakins says what she has to say straight out in elegant, simple English. … Can we learn something from Oono? But of course. In fact, more than just learn, we can be enriched, delighted and romanced. … books like Oono change us forever, even it it is only slightly. … Oono is a book about being alive. Being alive in the most visceral sense. … After reading Oono, our way of life feels and seems to resemble so much the ignook and the ooni. And Oono may just be this modern; this current and telling.

Prose and poetry merge in this story with inspiration, imagination and loveliness. It is a delightful book.