Big Bad

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.


Genre: Horror

"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

"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