The title story of T. Coraghessan Boyle’s new collection, Wild Child, is a fictional retelling of the life of Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron, born to a peasant family in revolutionary France under an unhappy star. His early hindrances include muteness, a “lax” mind and an unsympathetic stepmother, who, when Victor is 5 years old, leads him to the forest and slits his throat. “Still, it was enough,” Boyle writes in one of this story’s wealth of haunting moments. “His blood drew steam from the leaves and he lay there in a shrunken, skeletal nest, night coming down and the woman already receding into the trees.”
