Published in 2005
297 pages
Kelly Link is an American author best known for her short stories, which span a wide variety of genres – most notably magic realism, fantasy and horror. She is a graduate of Columbia University. Her stories have been collected in four books – Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, Pretty Monsters, and most recently, Get in Trouble. She has won several awards for her short stories, including the World Fantasy Award in 1999 for “The Specialist’s Hat”, and the Nebula Award both in 2001 and 2005 for “Louise’s Ghost” and “Magic for Beginners”. Link also works as an editor, and is the founder of independent publishing company, Small Beer Press, along with her husband, Gavin Grant.
What is this book about?
The nine stories in Kelly Link’s second collection are the spitting image of those in her acclaimed debut, Stranger Things Happen: effervescent blends of quirky humor and pathos that transform stock themes of genre fiction into the stuff of delicate lyrical fantasy.
In “Stone Animals,” a house’s haunting takes the unusual form of hordes of rabbits that camp out nightly on the front lawn. This proves just one of several benign but inexplicable phenomena that begin to pull apart the family that’s just moved into the house.
The title story beautifully captures the unpredictable potential of teenage lives through its account of a group of adolescent school friends whose experiences subtly parallel events in a surreal TV fantasy series.
Zombies serve as the focus for a young man’s anxieties about his future in “Some Zombie Contingency Plans” and offer suggestive counterpoint to the lives of two convenience store clerks who serve them in “The Hortlak.”
Not only does Link find fresh perspectives from which to explore familiar premises, she also forges ingenious connections between disparate images and narrative approaches to suggest a convincing alternate logic that shapes the worlds of her highly original fantasies.
