1/20
A week ago I finished reading two more of Kelly Link's short story collections: Magic for Beginners and Pretty Monsters, published in 2006 and 2008. I previously wrote about her first collection, Stranger Things Happen, here:
https://mastodon.social/@TheNudeSurrealist/115247883232891965
Spoilers to all stories follow.
2/20
Overall I liked both collections (there's some minor overlap). Link is very talented and versatile. She leans towards magical realism with strong horror vibes, with the realism strongly rooted in current-day American culture. I wouldn't classify the stories as horror, just as having horrific underpinnings, so to speak. Still, many stories revolve around death, or bullying, or both.
3/20
There's a bit of a problem with the ending of some stories: they often end on an ambiguous note. To me it had the effect of Link just stopping the story at a certain point, then glancing at me with a meaningful stare, waiting to see if I understood what she meant. And, well, sometimes I do. And sometimes I don't, and this leaves me feeling slightly uncomfortable. I admit I often do the same thing in my own flash fiction which I publish here, because sometimes it just feels right.
4/20
Individual stories from Magic For Beginners:
The Faery Handbag - Liked it, but IMO not as strong as other stories. It's lighter than the other ones and more "fun" while still discussing serious topics like refugees and migration. All even more important today than the time it was written. Still, not as strong.
5/20
The Ortlak - Dark story about coming of age and deadend jobs in a sort of alternate reality where zombies (well, consumer-zombies) exist on the US-Canada border. I liked it. Very Lynchian. I thought at first that maybe the title was a reference to the famous de Maupassant short story The Horla (which inspired Lovecraft), but I'm not sure now.
6/20
The Cannon - A standout: An absurdist fantastical story about cannons as living being and people being regularly shot from them and then living essentially in low orbit, told in fragments, while addressing the reader directly. I felt that as an experiment it partially failed, but the fact is I still remember it as a unique experience three weeks after reading it says it did something right. I wish Link had tried writing more like this, but tempered with a slightly more conventional style.
7/20
Stone Animals - The best story, IMO, in both collections. It's another good, dark Lynchian story, this time of a dysfunctional family with an emotionally missing father who move to a new supposedly haunted house. Strong psychological horror vibes. Many things happen which are just on the verge of being surreal, but not quite. Nothing is explicitly explained and a lot has to be inferred. The ending is very open to interpretation but I liked it.
8/20
Catskin - a fairy tale but with disturbing, horrific details. I personally don't like those, they're too dark and often feel like the author turns the darkness (and sometimes gore) to 11 just to make a point against traditional narratives, sort of like wannabe punks. Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter struck me the same way (although I sort of liked it).
9/20
Some Zombie Contingency Plans - Another strong, dark story about a teenager girl and an ex-con. It's not horror, or maybe it is. It's disturbing in the way it gets you to root for the viewpoint character, who is disturbed but you can't point out exactly how, until the very end.
10/20
The Great Divorce - Very good premise about a world where the dead can marry the living and have dead children (which they cannot see and have to use mediums). But it had no real plot and so was kind of boring.
11/20
Magic for Beginners - I didn't get it and I didn't like it. Maybe it's because it's very much steeped in 90s American TV culture, and despite growing up then I wasn't really into it. The story felt like a series of cute vignettes meant to evoke 90s nostalgia or something. But I didn't feel they came together, and I thought the ending was sort of weak. The story Vanishing Act from the previous book did a much better job with similar high-school-friends theme but with 70s culture.
12/20
Lull - I didn't like it much either. It has many things going at the same time: story-within-a-story, fairy tales, marriage problems, a surreal sub-story which becomes the actual story a-la Arabian Nights (also referenced directly in the text). But their cohesion felt kind of forced, and might have been better separated into their own stories.
13/20
Individual stories from Pretty Monsters:
The Wrong Grave - A morbid tale about a loser wanna-be poet kid who digs up a grave and wakes up the wrong dead girl. I didn't quite like it, it was similar to all Link's other stories about high-school or college dropouts. The Ortlak from the previous collection did a similar thing but in a much better way. Like other stories here, it features a bully picking on the geek guy. Learning about the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti was nice, though.
14/20
The Wizards of Perfil - My favorite. A very strong fantasy story. It's very dark, yes, but also about the only one in all Link's stories where everything is mostly explained, there's a real, unambiguous ending, and it's a good ending! But it takes a while to get there. The fantasy world is kind of steampunk, and it's a miserable place, filled with random wars and refugees no one cares about (not unlike ours). This one also features a bully, although she is reformed by the end.
15/20
Monster - A horror story about a geek who is bullied and publicly shamed by another kid (the sort of psychopath everyone has met in their lives) in a summer camp his parents forced him to go to. An actual monster then comes and brutally murders all the kids, but it's a cynical and intelligent one, almost like a Hannibal Lecter, say. The setting & bullying was slightly triggering to me, although I was never personally in this situation, so I can't really say I enjoyed it.
16/20
Pretty Monsters - Two very strong overlapping stories about teenage girls, one of them, again, features a kind of bullying. It has the best description of both high school girls and college-age girls I've read recently. The story-within-a-story thing was well done this time. There are 3 endings, 2 of them are good, one is weaker. But the horror angle, I think, made the 2 stories weaker (although it was well telegraphed and integral to the stories) so I liked it less than the other ones.
17/20
The Constable of Abal - Another great fantasy, similar to Wizard of Perfil, about a witch and her daughter who make do in yet another dark fantasy world with wars and refugees and uncaring gods. Good story with an unambiguous good ending. Excellent mother-daughter vibes. As opposed to Wizards of Perfil, not everything is spelled out, but the important bits are, and it's less of a morality story. Good worldbuilding in a small package. Also kind of has bullying (girl by her mother).
18/20
The Surfer - Wow. A near-future science fiction (actually the only science fiction in the 3 Link collection I read). Published in 2008, it has a world in a lockdown due to a flu pandemic, people addicted to their phones, and a fractured United States.
But there are also aliens who visit Earth briefly, and a kind of a hippy alien-loving religious cult who draws weirdos from all walks of life. So in a way this story marries the 60s-70s hippy new-age sensibilities with 2010 ones.
19/20
The story is written from a viewpoint of a teenager who is a high-school soccer champion but is also smart and well-read (I personally knew 2 such people, so that's not the science fiction part...), stuck in a foreign airport due to a lockdown. This viewpoint character is written very, very well. I think it's the strongest character in all the stories. He has the self-assured cockiness of a star athlete, but he's also cynical while being basically good-natured and responsible guy.
20/20
There's also a smart and cynical college girl stuck with them, who I think is a kind of stand-in for Link herself (based on the character's description and on interviews with Link I saw on Youtube). While obviously each writer puts himself in some form or another in their stories, that felt very close to the real Link. I liked that.
Also, no bullying in this story! A big plus for me. I still slightly prefer the much darker Stone Animals, though.
TheNudeSurrealist