Evie Wyld writes brutality the way it actually operates: not as a dramatic event you can point to, but as a climate you live inside. Her books don’t “deal with dark themes.” They make dark themes the air in the room. And then—crucially—she threads tenderness through it, not to soften the blow, but to make the blow impossible to ignore. The tenderness is the proof there was something worth protecting. That’s why it hurts.
Take All the Birds, Singing: a woman alone on a battered island farm, sheep dying in the night, paranoia tightening like wire. On paper, it’s primed for the usual gothic thrills—remote setting, animal fear, a stranger, a menace. Wyld refuses the easy version. The violence doesn’t arrive as a neat monster you can defeat. It’s lodged in the body, in memory, in the way a person learns to live braced for impact. The tenderness shows up in the bare companionship—dog, sheep, the grudging, uneasy fact of needing another human at all. It isn’t wholesome. It’s survival-level affection, the kind that doesn’t sparkle.
The Bass Rock goes even harder, because it takes male violence against women and strips away every comfortable story we tell ourselves about it. Not “one bad man.” Not “a different time.” Not “she should have—”. Wyld builds a chain across centuries around North Berwick and the looming rock itself, and she makes the point with a cold hand: the methods change, the alibis evolve, the harm persists. She doesn’t give you the catharsis of a single villain. She gives you the sickening continuity.
Wyld’s tenderness isn’t a rescue rope. It’s the quiet admission that the world could have been kinder—and chose not to be.
That’s the trap she sets for lazy readers. People love brutal novels as long as brutality stays aesthetic—rain, cliffs, blood, “grit,” a bit of literary shudder. Wyld’s tenderness sabotages that consumption. It stops the violence being a vibe. A cup of tea offered at the wrong moment. A body trying to care for itself and failing. A woman watching herself make the same bargain again. These aren’t sentimental touches; they’re indictments. They show the damage as relational, not just physical. They show what violence steals: not only safety, but the basic ability to trust your own need.
Her debut After the Fire, a Still Small Voice already had that instinct: Australia’s heat and isolation, two generations, war’s residue, family history that doesn’t stay politely in the past. Even there, tenderness is never clean. It’s awkward, compromised, sometimes dangerous—people reaching for each other with hands that don’t quite know how to hold. That refusal of purity is part of why her work feels so adult. She doesn’t write “good victims” or “good survivors.” She writes people shaped by what happened, not redeemed by it.
And when she turns to overtly personal territory—like the graphic memoir Everything Is Teeth—the tenderness becomes even stranger because it’s bound up with obsession, fear, and the childish logic of fixation. Sharks, teeth, heat, family: the point isn’t quirky confession. The point is how the mind builds private mythologies to cope with what it can’t name. That’s Wyld again: tenderness as a coping mechanism that doesn’t fix anything, just keeps you alive long enough to learn the next form of hunger.
Her newest work, The Echoes, pushes the same pattern into grief and haunting, split between London and Australia. There’s a risk here—any novel touching colonial violence can get swallowed by the industry’s appetite for pain-as-literary-credential—and the reception has been sharp in places for a reason. Wyld’s writing is powerful, but power isn’t innocence. If you’re going to write historical harm into the bones of a narrative, you don’t get to treat it like atmospheric fuel. Wyld’s best moments understand that. Her worst risk is that readers will do what they always do: take the horror, praise the “bravery,” and move on unchanged.
The easiest way to enjoy brutality is to call it “beautifully written” and let the sentence absolve you. Wyld writes sentences that refuse to do that job.
This is why her tenderness matters. It’s not there to comfort you. It’s there to remove your excuses. The small mercies in her books don’t counterbalance the violence; they expose how unnecessary the violence always was. They make you see the human scale of harm without turning that harm into décor. If you want your darkness packaged, go elsewhere. Wyld’s work keeps the tenderness raw, keeps the brutality mundane, and keeps insisting you stop consuming both like entertainment.
