Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Vampires in the Lemon Grove, a selection of short stories, explores imaginative settings while still injecting real life emotions and current struggles. The title story,even though about two long married vampires, is more about their relationship and addiction than about whether the thirst for blood can be satisfied with a fresh lemon. I enjoyed how each story created a new fantastical world - Japanese women turned into silkworms for the benefit of their country, a veteran's tattoo that seems to be subject to change based on the abilities of his masseuse, a stable of horses that are reincarnated presidents-- and yet the emotions of the characters were entirely relatable. Plus she really writes well.

I blinked down at a little blond child show more and then saw that my two hands were shaking violently, soundlessly, like old friends wishing not to burden me with their troubles. I dropped the candies into the children’s bags, thinking: You small mortals don’t realize the power of your stories.

Girls trailed him down the boardwalk, clucking stupidly about the new waxy sheen to his head. Samson was seventeen and had what Nal could only describe as a bovine charm: he was hale and beefy, with a big laugh and the deep serenity of a grazing creature.

She tries hard to spite the magazines and persist in her childhood belief that aging is honorable, to wear her face proudly, like a scratched medallion, the widening circles of purple under her eyes and the trenches on her brow.

He walks into the room with an actual swagger, that sort of boastful indifference to gravity that Beverly associates with cats and Italian women.

Book jacket:
A dejected teenager believes that the universe is communicating with him through talismanic objects left behind in a seagull’s nest. Girls held captive in a silk factory slowly transmute into human silkworms, spinning delicate threads from their own bellies and escaping by seizing the means of production for their own revolutionary ends. A massage therapist discovers she has the power to heal by manipulating the tattoos on a war veteran’s torso. And in the collection’s marvelous title story, two vampires in a sun-drenched lemon grove try helplessly to slake their thirst for blood. show less

A collection of strange and beautifully written short stories, in which, among other things, vampires learn to suck lemons, young women are turned into silkworms, and former US presidents find themselves reincarnated as horses. Oddly enough, the title story was, for me, the least satisfying of the lot (although still very well-written), but the best of them sort of crawl into your brain and do some really bizarre and interesting things in there. The silkworm story ("Reeling for the Empire") is particularly unforgettable.

I'm not sure if I can make sense of why I liked this so much. I think more than anything, and more than any recent books I've read, this one made me want to sit back, and think deeply about these stories. I could only manage to read two stories a night, because of this. And no author in a long, long time has done that for me.
I think I am now a huge fan of Karen Russell. This is some of the most intelligent writing I've ever read. Clever, inventive, precise, yet still packed with magnetic characters. The prose of each story, even if the styles vary, is always controlled, like each letter was set in place with tweezers. In fact, often times throughout the stories, I was arrested by the rich subtext beneath her bizarre tales. The final show more tale could easily have suffered the route of a bad horror film. Instead she get to the core of lonely, frightened boys playing at acting tough, like the characters in the last story.
Russell possesses such a gift for evoking a setting, so that I had no trouble shifting from Italy to Japan to an inner city playground. Once you accept her odd, interesting, imaginative worlds, it’s much easier to find the humor and truth in her characters. These stories span the globe, many different eras and a variety of socio-economic conditions, but at their heart, they all investigate lonely people in search of connections.

1. Vampires in the Lemon Grove (Title story): This story made the "Twilight" phenomenon seem as juvenile as it is. There's so much more to vampires! They're people just like us, and they have restraint, exotic histories, and can hold love for generations. It was quite a lovely story, but I was unsure of the ending.

2. Reeling for the Empire: This was one of my favorites and should be anthologized alongside Ray Bradbury. It has that old world feel, as if plucked from the 19th Century. I'm not sure if the story was a metaphor for the current problem of human trafficking, but anyone interested in this issue should read this. I don't want to give anything away, but this story was so weird, and so beautifully haunting, I had to walk away from the book and marvel at the author's expansive imagination. Such a large piece of investigation must have gone on, to learn about the spinning of silk, at this time! And customs, in that era. I was wowed.

3. The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979: A love story cross between Junot Diaz and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. As I ended this novel, I desperately wanted more details. I learned by this story, Russell has a way of holding back. She'll draw you in, but you're not getting that close. I, for one, wanted to learn more about the huge albatross masses that suddenly came into being there, and why.... And what about their stealing things? Man, that could have been a whole 'nother novel in Itself!! How? WHY??? Lol...

4. Proving Up: This one reminded me of Stephen King's short story, "The Man in the Black Suit". I'd love to ask the author if King was of any inspiration to her. There's also a Little House on the Prairie feel to the landscape and characters. Not giving away plot points, but this story will leave you proving up and staying up. (Like I said, Stephen King.) WHO was that figure, in the end...?

5. The Barn at the End of Our Term: Again, sheer inventiveness. Such imagination!! Dead presidents reincarnating into stable horses. Who else could imagine and pull this off in a dozen pages? This story started off somewhat slowly, but keep reading, it's just a set-up for the fantastic 'leap' at the end. The last few paragraphs had the thrill of the final straightaway at the Kentucky Derby. I would love more back story on it all.

6. Dougbert Shackelton's Rules for Antarctic Tailgating: This was my least favorite. I think you need to know more about Shackelton's exploration story to get the humor. I'm pretty sure this is supposed to be funny. But I didn't get it, sorry.

7. The New Veterans: My favorite story hands down. This is the one that makes me want to meet the author. This is a war story dealing with the issues of Iraqi war veterans. This story was well-researched and spot on. Her use of magic realism was awe-inspiring. She used the supernatural in a way that didn't detract from the reality of war, but enhanced it like a garnish, as if adding an even brighter ornament to the reverence we have for those that sacrifice their lives in war. And, she obviously researched massages.

8. The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis: Ok, by this story, I'm convinced that Russell is one of the smartest living writers. Anyone that has the experience of being marginalized during their school years will recognize this story, and Eric. She somehow accomplishes the impossible by forcing the reader to sympathize with the bully and the bullied. Perhaps that was the point, but if you want your stories to end cleanly, then this will leave you frustrated. Personally, I don't need a clean ending, but if I should ever have the honor of meeting Russell, I'm sure my first question will be, "What happened to Eric Mutis??!!??"

This is a great collection from a writer with a fresh, exciting voice, one to seek out, hold on and look forward to. I can't wait to explore Karen's other collection and read her novel, hoping that she will publish more of her great stories in the near future. Thumbs up!! show less

I truly loved "Swamplandia", and went into reading this collection with high expectations. Then I read the title story. I cannot recall the last time I have so disliked any short story. It was a struggle to finish the thing, and had I not read and loved Russell's prior work I would have stopped right there. To say the story is precious is a colossal understatement. A vampire who learns about the transience of satiation and the downside of forever. Just freaking adorable! Having read this I can see there were portions of "Swamplandia" that were similarly overwritten, but in the context of the entire book those things worked. This story is out there flapping in the wind with nothing to redeem it from its muck of message-y cuteness. Its show more like Faerie Tale Theatre for disillusioned 30-somethings. Given my dislike for the first story I almost stopped reading, but continue I did, and I am glad I made that choice. It turns out the remainder of the book is far better, and some of the work is positively gorgeous.

Though sometimes her stories are less than the sum of their parts, there is no question that Karen Russell is a fantastic writer. Her sentences are like perfectly cut jewels, inherently beautiful and remarkable for how they refract all that is around them. Hemmingway, move over, you have company in the "Best Sentences in American Lit" category. In the end I liked most of the stories and truly loved a few.

Like most reviewers, I was blown away by "Reeling for the Empire." This is among the best short stories I have read. One thing people complain about in reviews is that Russell's stories just end with no resolution. Not so here. This is spare but absolutely complete. I also shared with other reviewers a wildly positive reaction to "Proving Up." Russell dips into horror with this one, and that is typically not a genre I enjoy, but it works here. Where I differ from most other reviewers is that I liked all but one of the stories at the end of the book. Most reviewers extolled the first four stories and wrote off the remaining four as filler, but I disagree. "The Barn at the End of our Term" and "Dougbert Shackleton’s Rules For Antarctic Tailgating" were the most fun reads here. I laughed all the way through both of them. "The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis" was exceptionally thought provoking. "The New Veterans" was too long by half, and the characters seemed less nuanced than is typical for Russell, but it there was still some there there. I just re-read this and realized I had forgotten to mention that seagull story, which basically summarizes my thoughts on that story. Very MFA. It was entirely...fine.

So, all in all I am going to give this a 3-star. Maybe 3.5. There is lots of good here, but the vampire drek, the neverendingness of the veteran story, and the forgetablness of the seagull story make it hard to get to a four. I fully expect to see a couple of these stories in anthologies, and they will shine once they are divorced from the whole. show less

This is an excellent collection of short stories! I would have given it five stars, but the last story didn't grab me like the others. Karen Russell is so original and creative! Imagine all former presidents reincarnated as horses, or women spinning silk thread in their stomachs, or settlers sharing a piece of window glass to pass final homestead inspection, requiring one window minimum to be declared the landowner. Well worth a read!

If Russell’s debut was full of deeply original images, but behaps more about single situations than arcs, and Swamplandia! was a brilliant premise of a novel that became just a little one note, this is the book where she shows her full potential. For here are (mostly) tight little stories that will make you turn the pages BOTH to see where they are going and what oddness Russell will whip up next. For make no mistake, these are still strange stories, nesting uneasily in the borderland between horror, fantasy and magical realism, often with a bit of black humor thrown in.

At the heart of them are people (or,um, well, approximations of humans, I guess) trying their best to handle some rather hopeless circumstances. If I were to sum up show more this book in one word, “coping” comes to mind. From vampires bent on not drinking blood, to American presidents finding themselves reborn as horses in a stable in a place that very much resembles Kentucky, to the veteran tattooing the death scene of his friend all over his back, these stories deal with strategies, deliberate choices that are hard to make.

As we tend to say it in this group when we’re gushing over short stories: all of these are very good, and many of them are great. It’s hard to pick favorites, but two that resonated strongly with me was “Reeling for the empire”, about young Japanese women turned into living silk factories – a weird story with a strange sort of hopefulness to it. And “Dougbert Shackleton’s rules for Antarctic tailgating”, which says so much about what it is to love a losing team in sports (or life) through the wonderfully bizarre metaphor of rooting for Team Krill in the food chain. I loved this book, and I love where Karen Russell is going. Recommended both for you who loved Swamplandia! and those of you who felt it was a “close but no cigar” kind of book. show less

It was a nice mix of creepy, bizarre, and just plain funny stories. Russell really builds a little world for each of her stories to inhabit that feels simultaneously real and surreal. The tone shifts wildly within the stories, but they seem to fit together like a good mixtape. I found Proving Up, while probably my favorite of the bunch, to be particularly creepy. So, it was nice to have a really silly story following it to break the tension.

I'd definitely recommend this for anyone who likes strange short stories where you're left wanting to know just a little bit more about the worlds they inhabit.