An awesomely inventive tale-teller, Patricia Eakins has created a world that is a mirror of our own (only minus such human impediments as morality and memory). Its animals are tantalizing in their trompe l'oeil reality, rendered with disarming aplomb, and she sets them in fierce and unstoppable motion without a blink to give away her game. That deadpan poise is what gives these stories their rare menacing wit: Aren't these things possible? These species sound so plausible, their behavior so -- nearly -- familiar. … Patricia Eakins writes beautifully: a fine ear and a sense of shape make uncommon music of her direct imaginings. If you've had enough fiction-as-usual -- name brands, minor epiphanies, timid time-bound gestures -- The Hungry Girls has some astounding things to tell.

What most distinguishes her work is a thickness I'll call Geertzian, a packed quality -- the excitement and immediacy of lyric poetry. … The test is the sentence. Power is the word that comes to mind. The actual, physical presence of energetic mass, I mean energy/mass. It's the relentless electric charge of the fiction. … The test is the sentence. … In Eakins, there is an integrity, an authority, everywhere at all times present and accounting.

Like the doctor who reaches into one of her Hungry Girls and pulls out an astounding variety of objects, Patricia Eakins draws forth from her extraordinarily fertile imagination a rich and strange array of stories -- tales, really, for all are fabulous in the truest sense. In "Salt," Eakins writes, "The women then were all great dreamers. …" She herself is such a "great dreamer," and it is our good fortune to hear her tell her dreams. They are as precisely detailed as a surgeon's, as ripely sensual as a courtesan's.

Patricia Eakins's The Hungry Girls is as rare a creature as those that populate its pages, a genuinely original, beautiful, and disturbing work of art. It is a kind of imaginative bestiary for our times, but a bestiary in the same sense that Borges's Ficciones is a collection of myths or that Calvino's Cosmicomics is a scientific treatise. And it shares with these works a lightness of touch, comic wit, and astonishing inventiveness.

The Hungry Girls is a continuously startling work, an elegant violation of the rules of contemporary fiction. Like gamelan music or like creation myths and tribal histories, these stories have no real beginning or end. Each seems a piece of some larger record -- of a life, a people, a village, a culture. In part their genius resides in the authenticity of each story's tone and point of view and in part with the music and imagery of the language itself, which is poetic and sensuous. One savors the flow of words, sometimes rollicking, often disturbing, ever mysterious and evocative. That we cannot quite say what these stories mean speaks of the purity of their connection to the well-spring of human creativity. The characters (whether men, women, beasts, or something between) arise like dream figures, inexplicable, unless we make them safe by reducing them to less than what they are. These are stories that echo from so many regions of the psyche they confound analysis, and finally we must take them of a piece, both vivid and bewildering. Finally it is their aesthetic to which we are drawn, the intricate compilation of detail, evincing a rare and humbling artistry.

These stories are more than imagination; they are witty, playful, soberly detailed glimpses into realities totally believable. These stories are wicked in their conjoinment of what the eye sees and the heart and mind know. The settings are convincingly detailed, the language of each story richly native to it, and the animals are so living in their acts and behaviours and relationships one knows they are real.

Patricia Eakins's fables are a garden of earthly delights. Some of them (literally) made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. The Hungry Girls is rare, startling and brilliant. Her tales transported me to the land behind the looking glass where Franz Kafka dwells among the houris.

More than stories in a collection, Eakins's tales are palimpsests of cultures, the details of each slightly effaced portrait glancing through the layers of cultural imagination. With their faintly bizarre sexuality and their good humor, they belong to the world of fable, not to the dusty archives of academic anthropology -- they are, in that sense, fabulous.

In The Hungry Girls Patricia Eakins often displays a very personal brand of post-Surrealist anthropology or zoology which allows her to describe in great detail and most convincingly the complex customs or mythical beliefs of purely imaginary peoples or else the equally fanciful life-cycles of creatures as unreal as the Snark or the Boojum in the far more whimsical writings of Lewis Carroll. … In some of her stories Patricia Eakins displays an imagination similar to that of Yacov Lind in offering us a modern and psychologically more sophisticated form of the "gothic tales" of such writers of the early nineteenth century as Charles Brockden Brown, Robert Maturin, or Sheridan Lefanu.