"my favorite fantasy
writer, Miss Kelly Link"
-- Alan Cheuse, NPR, All Things Considered, June 2003
China Mieville's
list
of books to read
Philadelphia
City Paper, Sept. 26, 2002
New
York Magazine,
February 11, 2002
San
Francisco Chronicle, Sunday November 18, 2001
New
York Times Book Review, Sunday November 11, 2001
Washington
Post
Science
Fiction Weekly
Ink19
A review in Hebrew
-- any translations?
Strange
Horizons
Tangentonline
Gadfly
Online
Locus
Science Fiction Chronicle
F&SF
Montreal Mirror
Review
in Finnish
The
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Stranger Things Happen (Small Beer Press, $16) by Kelly Link
is a delightful collection of short stories set in a familiar-seeming
world.These stories have a
dreamy quality, and like traditional fairy tales, Link's often end with
a Grimm little twist.
"Shoe and Marriage" borrows
more than a bit from the story of Cinderella, and "Travels With the
Snow Queen" and "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose" play on fairy-tale titles
and content. There is also a recurring character, the Girl Detective,
who is a lot like a twentysomething Nancy Drew.
Link's stories include lots
of fairy-tale staples like ghosts, stepmothers and talking ravens. Still,
her characters' fears more often involve parents, careers, relationships
and being left than things that make noises in the night.
We are still afraid of poisoned
needles, strangers who offer candy to children, and what a mirror might
say when we look into it.
But the things that haunt
Link's characters are more subtle; they are the kinds of things that
really do keep people awake at night and leave them hungry for a comforting
word.
And no matter how odd the
events in her stories may seem, as this book's title says, stranger
things happen.
The Miami Herald,
May 25, 2002
Sinister. Dreamy. Supernatural.
Link's stories dazzle even as they unsettle. It's hard to imagine anything
stranger than a multi-legged beauty contestant, a noseless, nimble-fingered
father with a collection of metal and wood prosthetics or a deceased
man mailing letters to his widow from a netherworld bordered by a nappy
ocean with teeth. And that's for starters. The bizarre atmospherics
within these stories are driven as much by what is left unexplained,
as in The Specialist's Hat, where two identical 10-year-olds move to
a dark mausoleum of a house with their father after their mother's death.
The first sentence spotlights the Samantha twin while she speculates
that ''when you're Dead, you don't have to brush your teeth.'' The Claire
twin chimes in with ''when you're Dead, you live in a box, and it's
always dark, but you're not ever afraid.'' In this fashion, the twins'
fates are foreshadowed but never quite delineated, as their transformation,
of sorts, takes place off the page. Link blends myths, ghosts and alien
landscapes with a healthy ladle of modern life for stories that at first
confound but eventually order themselves into a titillating weirdness.
Rain Taxi
Link's stories defy explanation, or at least, brief summary, instead
working on the plane between dream and cognitive dissonance. They are
true to themselves: witty, beautiful, funny, and startling.
Asimov's
[H]er writing belongs
in the same camp as Jonathan Carroll's: spooky, indeterminate, a kind
of exemplar of literary Heisenbergism. The more you push on any one
dimension of her eerie, funny tales, seeking to know the unknowables
she deftly sketches, the less you know about other slippery aspects
of the text. Link is a fantasist in the grand tradition of Carol Emshwiller,
John Crowley, and Robert Coover, blurring the lines between dreams,
myths, and reality in exciting new ways. All this talent is on display
in Stranger Things Happen, an astonishingly good collection --
which gathers her World Fantasy Award winner "The Specialistâs Hat,"
plus two stories new to the world, as well as eight others -- into an
assemblage of awesome proportions. From its campy retro Nancy Drew-style
cover to its closing credits, this is a postmodern fairy-tale landmark.
Booklist
Link offers strange and
tantalizing stories -- contemporary fiction with a fairy-tale ambience
-- that explore the relationship between loss and death and the many
ways we try to cope with both. She boldly weaves myth and fairy tale
into contemporary life, drawing inspiration from the myth of Orpheus
and Eurydice, from the fairy tale of Cinderella, from the writings of
C. S. Lewis, and from the true story of the Donner party's descent into
cannibalism. Meet Humphrey, one of Zeus' many illegitimate sons, and
June, his girlfriend, who decides to travel to Hades to bring Humphrey
back. Learn the rules of being dead, and find out what really happened
between Kay and the Snow Queen. Ask yourself what would have happened
to the prince if he had never found the girl whose foot fit the glass
slipper. Link uses the nonsensical to illuminate truth, blurring the
distinctions between the mundane and the fantastic to tease out the
underlying meanings of modern life.
Publishers Weekly
The 11 fantasies in this first collection
from rising star Link are so quirky and exuberantly imagined that one
is easily distracted from their surprisingly serious underpinnings of
private pain and emotional estrangement. In "Water Off a Black Dog's
Back," a naïve young man who has never known personal loss finds that
the only way he can curry favor with his lover's physically afflicted
family is to suffer a bizarre amputation. The protagonist in "Travels
with the Snow Queen" reconsiders her fairy-tale romance when she deconstructs
the clichés of traditional fairy tales and realizes that their heroines
inevitably sacrifice and suffer much more than their heroes do. Link
favors impersonal and potentially off-putting postmodern narrative approaches,
but draws the readers to the emotional core of her stories through vulnerable
but brave characters who cope gamely with all the strangeness the world
can throw their way, In the books's most effective tale, "Vanishing
Act," a young girl's efforts to magically reunite herself with her distant
family by withdrawing from the world around her poignantly calls attention
to the spiritual vacancies and absence of affection in the family she
stays with. "The Specialist's Hat" features twin sisters whose morbid
obsessions seems due as much to their father's parental neglect as their
mother's death. Although a few of the selections seem little more than
awkward exercises on the absurd, the best shed a warm, weird light on
their worlds, illuminating fresh perspectives and fantastic possibilities.
Kirkus Reviews
Eleven stories showcase
a dexterous use of language and a startling, if frequently elusive,
imagination as ghosts, aliens, and the living dead invade the most mundane
aspects of everyday life. Newcomer Link references fairy tales, mythology,
and bits of our common contemporary cultural experience, not to offer
commentary but to take off on her own original riffs. So in "Shoe and
Marriage" we meet a dictator's widow, unavoidably reminiscent of Imelda
Marcos, living in a museum that displays the shoes she took from her
husband's murder victims. The story, which also describes a bizarre
beauty pageant, plays verbally with shoe metaphors from Cinderella's
slippers to Dorothy's ruby reds, but what touches you is not the author's
verbal acrobatics but the widow's deep sense of sorrow and horror. Like
many of the pieces here, "Shoe and Marriage" joins disparate parts that
don't always fit together, but linear connections are not the aim. When
she depends too much on pure cleverness, Link ends up sounding derivative
and brittle. "Survivor's Ball, or The Donner Party," in which two travelers
come to an inn where a creepy if lavish shindig is in full swing, reminds
you too insistently of Poe. "Flying Lessons," about a girl's love for
a boy whose desire to fly ends tragically (hint, hint), and "Travels
With the Snow Queen," in which the fairy tale is revamped to read cute,
come across as writing-school literary. But at her best, Link produces
oddly moving imagery. In "Louise's Ghost," two friends named Louise
have overlapping affairs. The shared name at first seems like another
joke, but the tale gradually digs deep into the emotionally charged
waters of loss and redemption. Stylistic pyrotechnics light up a bizarre
but emotionally truthful landscape. Link's a writer to watch.