A grab bag of creepy and weird

[bloodygranuaile]

As much as I like short stories, I almost ever actually sit myself down and read them, which is why I've had Gillian's copy of Kelly Link's short story volume Get in Trouble sitting on my shelf for like two years or something. But something or someone reminded me lately how awesome Kelly Link is, I can't remember what off the top of my head, so I brought it to Maine to read on my "avoiding finishing Dark Money" binge.

 

One of the reasons I don't read short story collections all that much is because they're a pain in the butt to review. Do I say something about each story individually? Just the ones that stuck with me most? Do I have opinions on whether the collection coheres into something I can evaluate as one whole?

 

All the stories are lyrical and creepy, although in some the creepy is served right up front and it some it stays away until right at the end. Fantasy short stories are always an interesting exercise in how much worldbuilding you can cram into a few pages, so in some of them, you're never really quite 100% sure what's going on, although I think that's usually intentional when it happens. The first story in the collection is The Summer People, which is fairly straightforward and easy to follow right up until the end, which is when you realize you've really dropped into a world of Linkian weirdness. The story that stuck with me the most was Valley of the Girls, about a bunch of Goth rich girls who build pyramids to themselves while their parents hire actors to pretend to be their real children because actual rich kids are so embarrassingly terrible. All the rich kids' names have cartouches around them in this story, a touch I really loved, and the narrator's name has been erased, which is a thing that happened sometimes in ancient Egypt when people died and their enemies took charge and wanted to obliterate them. Other than that, it was one of the more difficult stories to figure out all the normal stuff like what were all the relationships between the different characters. Some stories are a bit funny, like the one about the demon lover, which is creepy at the end but is mostly about a washed-up actor making an ass of himself, and some are sort of funny but also incredibly uncomfortable, like the one about the high school girl who pretends to be her thirty-something sister online and then goes to meet her online boyfriend who is also thirty-something. I think the one about the Ghost Boyfriend is also in Monstrous Affections: An Anthology of Beastly Tales and that she read part of it when we went to the Booksmith event for that. I should probably actually get around to reading Monstrous Affections too.

 

I think overall I may have liked Magic for Beginners better, but this was still a good read and proves that Kelly Link is creepier and more talented than most folks writing short stories these days.