Get in Trouble: Stories

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. 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.

Kelly Link has written a wonderful collection of short stories that transcend traditional genres. The writing is experimental and yet accessible. Some of the characters are bizarre, yet still relate-able (not a real word, but now that I've spoken it into existence it will hopefully show up in the dictionary soon).

What Link excels at is creating characters that are interesting and complex, and she conveys this in short a short period of time. While some of the situations are ridiculous (mail order boyfriends who are lifelike robots that teenage girls collect like Barbie dolls.), Link makes them believable and this is the hallmark of good writing. She takes you to places that you didn't know existed and when you leave them you feel as if show more you've actually been there.

There are elements of these stories that are reminiscent of Kafka, but Link clearly has a voice of her own, and that makes me reluctant to compare her writing to other authors. If you like unusual and innovative writing this book is for you.

Note: I received a free ARC of this book in exchange for an honest reivew. show less

Another brilliant book of short stories by Kelly Link. Where her earliest short stories had a sense of the archetypal about them -- they frequently felt more like half-remembered fairy tales than anything else -- her most recent stories have a specificity of setting and character that I find much easier to connect with. She can make the strange mundane, as she does with a pair of stories that take place in a world where superheroes are a daily concern. More rewarding for me are those stories where she makes the mundane uncanny: my two favorite stories in the book ("I Can See Right Through You" and "The Lesson") do that splendidly. Link twists stories in ways that you don't expect, and she is able to provoke more anxiety with a mere show more suggestion than other authors can by simply stating things plainly, and I genuinely appreciate that. The only thing I regret about finishing the book is that it may be a while before I get to read more of her stories. show less

Once upon a time there was a girl that loved SF, fantasy and horror (and any combination of them) but could not stand the border genres of speculative fiction - slipstream, magic realism, weird, name your own genre that mixes genre and mainstream - they all just sounded as a jumble of unreadable prose. And then she read a story which caused her to try a collection from the same author specializing exactly in these border genres... and that opened a new world. The girl of course was my own younger self, the time was 2006 and the author was Kelly Link. I cannot remember which that first story was - it seemed unimportant at the time and I was reading a lot of stories back then but "Magic for Beginners" always reminds me that even when I do show more not like a style, there may be that one author that can open it for me and allow me to read a lot of other authors after that. I still prefer the straight genre stories to those borderline ones but I am not ignoring them anymore. And I had found quite a lot of favorite authors that write them. I will not go and search Link's stories (and if you look at the credits, most of those were published in literary journals (which I am so behind on reading that it is scary) and not in the genre ones) but when she publishes another story collection, there was no way I am not reading it.

This time it contains 9 stories - 8 reprints and 1 original.

"The Summer People" - Kelly Link has a very special style - a mix between slipstream, magical realism and any other border genres. And this story showcases this style perfectly. A young girl is left home alone when her father decides again to go somewhere to find God. And he leaves her some chores to do - because the summer people are coming and she needs to prepare the houses for them. He does not care that she is really sick or that leaving a girl alone is not the best of ideas. But this world is not exactly ours - because one of those summer houses is inhabited by creatures from a different world - ones that can grant wishes or help; ones that have demands and that need a human to be bound to them to collect all they need. Add a friendship in the mix (a very unlikely one) and it is a lyrical story about longing and choices (and I don't really want to think about Ophelia).

"I Can See Right Through You" - a love story that transcends time and space. Reality merges with the imaginary; ghosts and bad choices collide in a story that is rooted in reality but has enough supernatural elements to not be considered mainstream (as if that distinction actually matter). Considering that for most of the story everyone is naked, it is surprisingly clean story - but then Link has her way to say things in a way presents any idea without resorting to vulgarity or worse. And there is a Ouija board somewhere there as well.

"Secret Identity" - when a 15 years old girl falls in love online with a 34 old man, she needs to lie in order to make him interested. And when they finally a due to meet, things get a little out of hand. The hotel they choose has two conventions running at the same time - dentists and superheroes (which are real and exist) and our protagonist have a bit of a weird time. The story is a letter she sends to Paul Zell (the man she was supposed to meet). The story is swinging from comical to dramatic and back and despite its pretty disturbing subject, the story is nice and makes you smile a lot more than it makes you cringe. And we even have a real villain to help the situation...

"Valley of the Girls" - In a future world, the rich do not need to worry about their mistakes as young men and women coming and biting them and old pictures resurfacing - as they have Faces to stand in for them. And in that society, the Egyptian pyramids and symbols had returned - with the same meaning and elements but in a very different world. Which makes it a bit strange. But the loneliness and the feeling of self is not helped by that and the teenagers are as screwed up as today's rich ones. The last two paragraphs in the book are in the opposite order compared to the online edition of this story (https://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/summer_2011/valley_of_the_girls_by_kelly_link) which is.. interesting. I am kinda discarding the chance that it is a mistake in either form - and that ambiguity makes things a bit weirder. In a good way. And the written form is a lot more evocative of the idea than the online one (the depiction of cartouches and so on adds something to the feeling of replace-ability)

"Origin Story" - the world is different from ours - mutants and superheroes exist. But if you strip these differences and just read the story as if they are metaphors or as if these elements were not there, it's a heart breaking yarn about love and betrayal, cruelty and friendship, choices and the future in a small town. The usual sparse prose works here nicely because the ugly moments are just hinted at - while some not so ugly ones are pretty explicit. The story packs a strong emotional punch and even the end should have been obvious, it still surprised me.

"The Lesson" - the original story in the collection is a lot lighter on non-mundane topics than any of the older stories. It is a prolonged meditation on the topic of love and belonging (with a surrogate mother, a baby and a wedding thrown in the mix - not all connected directly) and despite that while I was reading it I was not exactly enamored by it, I liked it a lot more as a whole at the end. It's lyrical and nice and even the bad things happening do not change that (and it can be considered a mainstream story for the non-genre readers with no issues. I was missing the special imaginary take that Link usually takes in this kind of stories though - even when it is an almost invisible one. The few places where it could have been, it was more veiled and easily explained than usual...)

"The New Boyfriend" - it is not so easy to mix ghosts with robots (or something close to robots) and yet Link manages to. It is a dark twisty story about love and choices. Being told with the voice of a young girl, the story is heartfelt and you can hear the teenager pouting and falling in love... and having her heart broken. It feels like a teen movie in the future, a version of "Clueless" and as charming as the original.

"Two Houses" - a spaceship carries its sleeping crew to Proxima Centauri, awaking them occasionally for celebrations and for any other needed purposes. Two ships had been launched - "House of Mystery" and "House of Secrets" - and House of Mystery had disappeared soon after. When the story starts, the ship had just awaken everyone for a birthday celebration and the travelers decide to tell each other ghost stories. Story inside of a story is not always easy to pull off but it works beautifully here. And soon you start wondering what is the reality and what is the story - especially when the missing ship seems to reappear. Or does it?

"Light" - the world built in this story is fascinating. Things had started going weird - people with multiple shadows, shadows turning into people, pocket universes started showing up and things from those universes started to spill out - which made mermaids a menace all over the place and the old paradise corners of the world are now just the paler copies of the pocket universes which are all over the place - and to all that you can add people turning up asleep all over the place - weird people in non-related places. But this story is not in a pocket universe - it is set in the Keys in Florida when a hurricane is about to hit. Following one of the residents and he family and work, Link adds more and more to this new world. For a short story that world is developed better than in most novels I had read and that makes it more the pity that the story is one of the least developed. It almost feels pointless - it is more a feeling and a slice of life story but I wish something more had happened - the world is so fascinating that it feels misused.

Overall it is another great collection - even if not all the stories are perfect or to my taste, I still like the overall. Link's style can be quirky but it works for me. show less

“Close encounters of the absurd kind.”

A young girl, in rural North Carolina becomes a caretaker of a mysterious cottage, inhabited by spectral residents. An aging film star, made famous, in a series of vampire films, visits the set of a ghost-hunting reality show. A fifteen year old, travels to NYC, to meet a much older man, she met online, staying at a fancy hotel, that is hosting both a dentist and superhero convention.
The rest of these wonderful stories are filled with astronauts, demon lovers, surrogate mothers, iguanas and life-size boyfriend dolls. Most of the stories may be fanciful, but Link, breaths warmth and life into this oddball array of characters. Her writing is smart, insightful and darkly humorous.
This is my first show more Link collection and she has quickly become a favorite. I am looking forward to reading all of her earlier work. show less

Kelly link’s stories are grounded in the reality of everyday living and relationships, but also totally outside of our reality. Post-apocalyptic heroes mingle with single mothers.

Like George Saunders, Link deftly blends reality with magical realism and fantasy, leavened with a large dose of humor. Often she goes off the reality rails totally, as in “Valley of the Girls,” which imagines modern sybaritic spoiled youth in an ancient Egyptian context. “Light” features pocket universes, possible clones, and “sleepers,” which seem to be sleeping bodies that turn up in various places, and other really strange things in the Florida Keys with a hurricane on the way. Link creates her own worlds, often in the ruins of our world.

There show more is truly not a dull moment in this collection. Link’s unique vision carries each of these stories through to someplace familiar yet unknown, show less

Kelly Link really is a treasure. This collection of nine stories are strange, bewitching, true, and fantastic. Some, like "The Summer People" and "Secret Identity", could be in our world, just from a unique (if unreliable) point of view. Others, like "Valley of the Girls", are fables of the future speaking to the present. They all toe the line of the slipstream while very much speaking to us, now. Link is a beautiful writer, who reminds me most of Bradbury if he wasn't buried in a particular sort of mid-20th century middle American mindset. Read these stories.