Kim Fu

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the twelve unforgettable tales of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, the strange is made familiar and the familiar strange, such that a girl growing wings on her legs feels like an ordinary rite of passage, while a bug-infested house becomes an impossible, Kafkaesque nightmare. Each story builds a new world all its own: a group of children steal a haunted doll; a runaway bride encounters a sea monster; a vendor sells toy boxes that seemingly show more control the passage of time; an insomniac is seduced by the Sandman. These visions of modern life wrestle with themes of death and technological consequence, guilt and sexuality, and unmask the contradictions that exist within all of us.

Mesmerizing, electric, and wholly original, Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century blurs the boundaries of the real and fantastic, offering intricate and surprising insights into human nature.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Listen to Author Fu on The Next Chapter for some very interesting insights into her writing.

This collection kicks off May is Short Story Month with a loud, explosive crashing percussive event. This is the best kind of short speculative fiction: Nothing shouts at you, no readily dateable stylistic flourishes that never do what the author imagines they will.

Strap in...we're headin' into the venerable institution of the Bryce Method. Short comments on each story, starting below.

Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867 is the best intro to the author and her hobby horses. A world where there is a simulation technology that enables people to see whomever or whatever they desire, someone wants to see their recently dead mother to take a fantastic opportunity to get it right this time BEFORE she dies. An operator denies the application time after time, saying the truth is it's proven to be too addictive... plus the technology could present Mother in a quantum superposition of both alive and dead. The ideas are way richer than you or I would so much as dare to think about, still less explore as deeply as Author Fu does. Bold, fearless, deeply troubling. 5* and a cheer for this being the story that won the short-fiction 2022 Shirley Jackson Award!

Liddy, First to Fly explores the horrors of puberty via body horror...a girl grows wings on her lower kegs, decides she will use them, her world turns upside down in each possible area of her life. The role of friends comes in for some scary but bracing contextual changes. The adolescence of any girl, turned up to eleven on the scay-meter. 4*

Time Cubes truly gave me nightmares without needing to go to sleep first. Alice lives in our not-that-distant future as a "Depressive Insider." Her one fervent desire is to be no longer alive; all else is pale and vague. One day her existence brings her ro someone whose one amazing invention is an anti-aging machine. It has a reverse gear...4* for ineffable weird and eerieness.

#ClimbingNation rings a...fun? engrossing, anyway...change on the "a stranger calls" story when April, a social-media fangirl, attends an Instagram star mountaineer's wake using an old scraped acquaintance as her entrée. The way to be unobtrusive is to be helpful, and inconspicuous. It leads, in this case, to her learning how one accidental death is about to become two. Very Poe-esque. 4* and a solid shivering bow of respect

Sandman ruined forever my ability to listen to "Mister Sandman", previously a favorite...now it feels prurient, almost pornographic. "Please turn on your magic beam" indeed. Since I seldom have trouble getting to sleep, I have no voluptuous response to it, though it is obvious why this would be the case. Terrifying to know how many have reason to find ecstasy in what I just...do. 5 utterly unnerved stars

Twenty Hours "After I killed my wife, I had twenty hours before her new body finished printing downstairs." A terrible, horrible, no-good way to combat the quotidian sameness of marriage, a toy that makes another person an object...literally, not merely "objectified"...and manages also to indict capitalism as the vicious, sadistic thing it truly is. 4.5*

The Doll is doll horror *convulsive shudder* plus Babbitty snobbery and class judgment seen through a kid's eyes. Effective iteration of a nothing-new plot. 3.5*

In This Fantasy will drive the Punctuation Prioresses potty. Every-damn-thing is a parenthesis. And that's the point. What does a life so deeply, existentially, killingly boring leave is inhabitant but fantasy lived in parentheses? Sad, saddening, filled with the masked hatred of the trapped. 4*

Scissors is...there's no other word, okay phrase then pedants, than "D/s porn". Two women enact a performance-art version of so many subs' fantasy of being used, passed around. As the first explicitly lesbian story, it stands out; as a story for mainstream audiences in a collection, telling it from the sub's close first-person PoV makes it fluoresce and strobe with intense, focused sexual energy. WILL OFFEND SOME. 5 deeply moved, slightly aroused stars

June Bugs traces Martha and Neil's intense, toxic connection from giddy-up to whoa. The abuse escalates from verbal to physical to emotional as their accidental, impulsive couplehood deteriorates, Martha leaves...Neil follows...and those june bugs! 3.5* for big "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff?" energy

Bridezilla is the slightly off-putting third-person close PoV narrative of a woman who, in spite of her chosen man's entire expression of passive selfhood, agrees to marry him...then doesn't go through with it, in the most humiliating possible way. There's a sea monster in there, though for the life of me I could not see how or why. My least favorite story. 3*

Do You Remember Candy? is my worst NIGHTMARE! Something...we never learn what...destroys everyone's (around the world, it seems, though we stay focused on Allie and her daughter Jay) ability to taste food. Can you even *imagine* the response in France? Or...holy mother goddesses...ITALY?! So Allie is one of the few who really care about this, keeping her memories of the glories of eating real food alive as Industry pivots to making goos, glops, and pills to keep people nourished. It becomes a fetish, shared among the few, the embarrassed oddballs, to keep those memories alive. Allie becomes the keeper of this secretive sensuous crowd's fantasies made physical. Her daughter, young when...whatever it was, no one looks into it much after a time...happened and is utterly unmoved by the consuming (!) passion of her elders. Awful, scary reminder that no matter how we feel about things as they are, they become normal. And the past...vanishes. 4.5*

Superb speculative fictions that made me think, squirm, and pray for the future to all those useless gods I don't believe in. Not quite even enough in quality for all five stars. show less

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An eerie, spellbinding novel of grief, ghosts, apocalyptic rain, and slowly splintering reality, from an author who “writes with a pen as sharp and precise as a lancet.” —PEN/Hemingway Award judges’ citation

In the aftermath of her mother's death, Eleanor is unmoored. For years, her mother orchestrated every detail of her life—from meals, to laundry, to finances—as Eleanor focused on her career as an online therapist. Left to navigate the show more world on her own, Eleanor clings to her mother’s final directive: use her inheritance to buy a house.

Desperate to obey her mother one last time, Eleanor impulsively buys a model home in a valley-turned-construction site, a picturesque development steeped in a shadowy history. It feels like a fresh start, until the rain comes—an endless, torrential downpour. As water seeps in through the house’s cracks, the line between what is real and what is not begins to blur. Haunted by the stories of her clients, a stream of workmen and bureaucrats she can’t trust, and visions of ghosts from her past and present, Eleanor’s reality unravels, and she is forced to reckon with the secrets she’s buried and the choices she’s made.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: When something is too good to be true, it is. Nothing is more guaranteed to blind you to that reality than desperation. Eleanor's mother, Lele, has controlled Eleanor's life to the point of a toxic...but comfortable...dependence on Lele for the mechanics of living. Tedious adulting offloaded onto a partner is seldom a good idea, and when the partner is a parent it is catastrophic. Parents die. it's part of the bargain. Eleanor finds Lele's death more than merely unpleasant, more than simply painful: it's her utter undoing. Lele cooked, laundered, managed Eleanor's world. Her inevitable death, far too early it's true, unmoors Eleanor in every way.

Parents expect their children will grieve on their death but continue to live and to manage themselves as one has taught them to do. Lele has not taught Eleanor anything of note, for complicated reasons no doubt but the effect is now all Eleanor has is last instructions: Buy a house.

Ever bought a house? It is complicated, it is intimidating, it is unnervingly legal and permanent and deepy scary. Eleanor is ludicrously ill-suited to the task on every level. It is no wonder she, deeply immersed in her business life of being a therapist, makes practical mistakes with emotional consequences. She can afford this really cool-sounding house in a stunning natural setting? How? That should be so far out of her reach...what's the catch, where's the trigger, what?? But you need to be savvy to the ways of the world to see that from the off, Author Fu writes this description of the realtor who sells her this place: "His thick hair was slicked back, coiffed high off his forehead. He smiled toothily as she approached. He held his hand out for a shake, and a large watch slid out of his jacket sleeve, the band and bezel the same chrome brightness as his car."

Run, Eleanor, run! But of course she doesn't. So she ends up with the whitest elephant of all white elephants. And the unraveling begins.

It's here where I leave Eleanor and her plight to you to discover. I took the trip to tell you if it was one worth taking, and why. It's a modern take on horror, this dread and unmooredness, this sense of waters so much deeper than you thought fro looking at them, this...unease. Eleanor stands in for us on the cusp of a revolution no one wants, on every front. No matter how much AI slop "They" feed us, people don't care about it; no matter how much doubt "They" fling over reality, summers are hotter and winters weirder and more violent; so there's a constant pressure to mistrust your own sense of Reality and leave everything to "Them" to manage.

It's not going well. For us, for Eleanor, for the planet.

The way the story unfolds is intended to build that...wrongness, unease, unhappiness...into the experience the reader and Eleanor exist inside, to make the boil expand so it will finally pop, them be cleaned out. But by whom? At what cost in pain and unpleasant side effects? Can we, in fact, clean up our own mess?

Not if we, like Eleanor, have no real connection to the way "They" are running reality on our behalf.

It's short enough as a read to be a weekend's focused read. It's intense enough as a narrative to support that kind of sustained attention. It's a deeply satisfying immersion into the slow awakening of a grieving soul to the cost of extending childhood far, far too long. It's hard to be alive in a world beset by challenges too big to make a positive difference in by one's self.

Welcome to adulthood. Go out and do the work, no matter how scary or hard, because the alternative is drowning. show less

Imagine buying your first house… and realizing the boundary between the living and the dead was included in the sale.

This story follows Eleanor, whose mother dies and leaves her one final request: use the inheritance to finally buy a home.

The problem? Eleanor has lived under her mom’s watchful, overprotective eye her entire life… and she’s never really made a big adult decision on her own.

So when a very enthusiastic real estate agent puts a pen in her hand and shows her a gorgeous show more model home in a half-finished development… she signs everything.

No inspection.
No questions.
No reading the fine print.

And that’s when she learns exactly what “as is” really means.

Because the rain starts leaking through the windows… the walls… and apparently the barrier between the living and the dead.

And yes — her mother starts visiting.

What starts off feeling almost cozy and a little eerie slowly turns into something darker as Eleanor tries to figure out the house, the ghosts, and whether she’s actually ready for the life she just bought.

At its core, it’s really a story about grief, consequences, and the price of wanting more than you’re ready for.

Thanks to Zando and Netgalley for this egalley. show less

The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts by Kim Fu is a deeply thought-provoking psychological horror that explores the complexities of the human mind rather than relying on traditional scares. The story feels haunting in a quiet, unsettling way, focusing on the emotional and mental struggles a person endures. Eleanor’s character stands out as the heart of the book—her loneliness and inner turmoil are portrayed with striking depth. You can almost feel the darkness surrounding her, page after page. show more The moments of despair are raw and impactful, making the story linger long after it ends. It’s a subtle yet powerful exploration of psychological horror. show less