Kelly Link

In 2008 I was busy moving out of my parents’ house and going to university in another city to complete a reading-intensive English Literature and History degree, so I was understandably out of touch with the current publishing trends in my favourite genre. And yet, if this collection showcasing the “year’s best” fantasy and horror is anything to go by, I apparently wasn’t missing out on much… Reading this collection was honestly a slog, and I am hard pressed to recall any stories show more that stood out to me from the over 2 months it took to get from cover to cover. What I do recall is a decidedly sharp focus on stories with strong horror elements and a preponderance of tales with overtly obnoxious chauvinist tone. I’m talking stories where all the women are typified by the male gaze, the protagonists mansplain ad nauseum to the reader, and are narrated via storytelling that relies on shock value, violence, and expectedly sordid mystery to get us to the finale. Honestly, very few of the tales made it past the first few pages for me, and I regularly found myself throwing the collection down in disgust to pick up literally anything else on my TBR to remedy my reading mood. It’s really too bad that the collection was so disappointing, because I was looking forward to getting into some short stories, discovering some new authors, and revisiting a time period in publishing that I seemingly missed out on. So much for nostalgia always being a positive recollection, I guess… show less

This collection of weird tales is, I believe, best described as the off-beat among what's usually considered off-beat. They're inventive, depend entirely on the author's fascinating skill of summoning an atmosphere that is at once mundane, creepy, and ungrounded. Link is clearly an author with a chink in her imagination, and the stories she produces are truly wondrous.

Short stories based on, inspired by or in tribute to fairy tales, transmuted by the unique sensibility and style of Kelly Link into sharp, acerbic, eerie, beautiful, elliptical and thoroughly modern stories, each one a strange and sometimes terrible and always amazing world unto itself.

The final story, Skandar's Veil was in the Shirley Jackson trbute Anthology, Things Get Dark. Halfway through the story, when the bear begins to tell its story, I started to cry. I don't know why. Perhaps it show more was the sheer accumulation of subtle enchantments in the story, in the series of stories, that reached some kind of peak at that single ineffable moment. It's weird, I can still feel the state persist as I type, the state of having read a Kelly Link story and started crying when a bear speaks. Was it grief, or happiness, or memory, or loss, or envy, or longing? I think it was mostly the good things, with maybe one of the bad things. Or it was something else entirely, unrelated to a Kelly Link story, unrelated even to myself, something that passed through me on its way to somewhere or someone else. It happened, though, and I am recording it here so that even though I might forget, I will at least have written it down before moving on and getting on with my life. show less

Wry, dark, playful and enchanting, each story in this remarkable collection is like a window into a skewed parallel universe. Kelly Link's worlds contrast the mundane and the extraordinary - one tale features a hotel overrun by two concurrent conventions, one for superheroes and one for dentists. But amidst all the vampires, astronauts, robot boyfriends, and "twins" that grow from a child's second shadow, real people strive to understand their own relationships and connect with one another. show more Link is particularly good at writing teenage girls, but all of her characters exist in three dimensions. I devoured this collection in a single gulp but the evocative themes and imagery will stick with me for a long time to come. show less