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Jelly Ink Press |
stranger things happen by Kelly Link
From the Montreal Mirror, December 2001
Dream eater
>> Kelly Link's hard-to-find, fantastic fiction is worth searching out
by JULIET WATERSThere are three kinds of food, we're told in "The Girl Detective," one of Kelly Link's short stories. "One is the food that your mother makes for you. One is the kind of food that you eat in restaurants. One is the kind of food that you eat in dreams. There's one other kind of food, but you can only get that in the underworld, and it's not really food. It's more like dancing."
If there were only three kinds of short stories, Kelly Link's would probably also be the kind that's "more like dancing." Thankfully, you don't have to go to the underworld to get them. But you will have to go online (Amazon.com or directly from Small Beer Press at LCRW.net) since they aren't yet distributed in Canada. It's a rare short story writer who's worth the effort, but Link is that rarity.
In Stranger Things Happen, her first collected stories, the girl detective is going to the underworld to find her missing mother. "Think of the underworld as the back of your closet...full of things that you've forgotten about."
Things like Nancy Drew books, really scary fairy tales, gothic nightmares, creepy science fiction comic books, teen slasher movies and dumb blonde jokes, all of which appear in some form in these stories.
In "Travels With the Snow Queen," Link's retelling of the Hans Christian Andersen classic, a now grown-up Gerda tells about her search for her kidnapped companion Kay, taken away by a "slut in a sleigh," as though this were an episode of Sex and the City.
Blonde aliens invade New York in "Most of My Friends Are Two Thirds Water." Or at least that's what Jak (who in the first line of the story decides to drop the "c" from his name) believes. This sparks a rash of nasty jokes from a jealous brunette narrator who kind of has a thing for Jak herself. "A blonde and a brunette work in the same office, and one day the brunette gets a bouquet of roses. Oh great, she says. I guess this means I'm going to spend the weekend flat on my back, with my legs up in the air. Why, says the blonde, don't you have a vase?"
"The Specialist's Hat" is poetic, ghostly and sad yet illuminated with lightning flashes of humour: part Edgar Allan Poe, part Bronte sisters, part Halloween (the movie), and--most frightening of all--part ordinary life. Grey-eyed twins with a rich fantasy life live in a haunted mansion with their indifferent father. "At dinner, usually hot dogs and baked beans from a can, which they eat off paper plates in the first floor dining room, beneath the chandelier," they listen to dad recite lame poetry. Upstairs, their nameless, ghostly babysitter waits to lure them into eternal limbo.
At her most literary Link is reminiscient of Angela Carter or surrealist Montreal writer Kate Sterns. But as soon as one is tempted to compare Link's writing to anything or anyone, she gracefully slithers into another skin.
Her stories are satisfying, bizarre, hilarious and beautiful. Reading them feels a lot like "eating dreams," something the girl detective does when she's searching for her mother down below. They are full of weird, terrible and lost parents. A noseless father has a repertoire of wooden noses he's made himself--one with a rose velvet lining, another painted with flowers. A legless mother uses her wooden leg to beat her daughter and her daughter's librarian lover. But Link's stories are also full of crafty, witty, imaginative grown-up children. Damned perhaps, but not broken.
Jonathan Lethem, author of the eccentric classic Motherless Brooklyn, probably puts it best: "Kelly Link is the exact best and strangest and funniest short story writer on earth that you have never heard of at the exact moment you are reading these words and making them slightly inexact. Now pay for the book."
Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link, Small Beer Press, pb, 270pp, $16 (U.S.)