Belly Up jangles with the voices of other writers. Her fearless characterizations echo Jincy Willett; her stark, unsettling sentences evoke Joanna Ruocco; her crafting of a tautological biosphere that only contains the kind of people who would appear in her stories suggests Miranda July; and, for many reasons, her work calls to mind Guggenheim fellow Mary Gaitskill. Singing through this braid of whispers is Bullwinkel’s own confident voice, which displays a talent for compression staggering in a debut collection and proves that the prose belongs to her alone ... Bullwinkel appears to be on the side of language, but beyond that her loyalties are murky ... these stories, like Gaitskill’s, are extraordinary, mature, and complete. They also showcase a knack for killer first sentences ... It’s hard to find fault with such skillful sentences. Still, what would these stories sound like if they had heart? In Belly Up, a profound talent has manifested, one that is experimental in the best sense.

We’re never entirely certain where these stories of recognition and reinvention are going to go, of what the rules are. What keeps us here is the intelligence and precision of Bullwinkel’s prose, which allows her to mine the deeply strange and deeply intimate with abandon and exactitude ... Belly Up is full of reckoning, full of curiosity, full of characters attempting to pull themselves out of the mundane, out of what is expected of them. This feels akin to yanking a plant out of the soil from its root; the experience is intensely odd and simultaneously invigorating ...The surrealism that floats through these stories feels in conversation with Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, which transcends genre and vibrates with emotional intensity ... The juxtaposition of the surreal and the introspective strikes a remarkable a balance that is alive and well in Bullwinkel’s collection. The characters in Belly Up demand our attention, they demand to be seen, to be recognized.

Bullwinkel writes very intimate and small lives filled with the details that make daily existence absurd, which are then shot through with thought experiment ... When an author paints bourgeois life with such attention and care only to rip it open with the supernatural, they do something different than the Gothic thrill-peddlers of old ... We can see Bullwinkel as an inheritor to [Robert] Aickman’s particular strain of weird fiction...Ordinary life is boring, all these writers show, and that is precisely where the horror lies ... Both Aickman and Bullwinkel perform autopsies on hidden entities that lie just under the surface of daily existence. Is that hungry spirit god, the devil, some mythical creature, or simply our own hideous human nature? By refusing grand stakes and instead conducting funny fictional experiments, Aickman and Bullwinkel get closer to the truth; closer to describing whatever lives under the floorboards.

Bullwinkel covers a lot of stylistic territory here—some of these stories deal with the uncanny, while others fall in a more realistic vein—but the emotional consistency that carries through the book helps it to achieve a welcome unity. Alternately, consider these variations on a theme regarding mortality and isolation: timeless themes, rendered in an unpredictable manner ... in the end, Belly Up is a haunting carnival, a celebration in defiance of extinction, and an embrace of the weirdness of life, and what might come after.

Belly Up provides a mix of snappy short-shorts and longer, more intricate pieces ... Bullwinkel’s style shifts from story to story, occasionally antic but more often than not hilariously deadpan. She’s adept at finding the indelible image ... each story is adventurous in attitude and unique in intent.

...the latest, impressive short story collection from A Strange Object ... It’s a dense and masterful book. It feels like a jungle in there, with bursts of flash fiction flitting between longer, winding, fleshed-out short stories ... I can appreciate stories that know their length and own it.

Rita Bullwinkel’s debut collection Belly Up moves with a kind of syncopated rhythm. Short vignettes and tableaus mix with more gradually accruing stories, creating a sense of restlessness — a turning from one side to another. This unfixed energy is applied to the constraints of embodiment: its weaknesses, its materiality, its maybe inherent monstrosity. From thrillingly unexpected angles, Belly Up circles around and picks at the constraints of being ... Contrasting with the book’s rigorous experiments in style are a few more conventionally structured tales ... Bullwinkel shows the same eye for detail and fine phrasemaking that she deploys more flamboyantly elsewhere, but the pacing of these more subtle pieces can feel less energetic. First-person narrations are sometimes slightly indistinct, and characters can be a bit too diligent in articulating their thoughts and observations. And yet these stories of everydayness also provide a needed break or upbeat from so many daring, overstuffed scenes. It’s the variety and balance of these elements that compel the reader to turn the page, anticipating whatever the heck is next. A strong, perversely buoyant debut, Belly Up’s pages pulse with life — and death, and a few beats in between.

Bullwinkel’s strength lies in her realistic portrayals of the human emotions these surreal situations amplify ... Readers will enjoy contemplating Bullwinkel’s launching points, but the strength of her writing and the nuanced views will stay with them long after.

Weirdness is almost de rigeur in short fiction these days, but Bullwinkel also shows impressive range and deep emotional intelligence. While the shortest pieces in the book can be frustratingly oblique, when Bullwinkel gives herself a larger canvas to dive into the grief and panic of characters caught between one thing and another, her stories approach brilliance.