Kelly Link

Story Collections:

Stranger Things Happen — (2001) Publisher: This first collection by award-winning author Kelly Link takes fairy tales and cautionary tales, dictators and extraterrestrials, amnesiacs and honeymooners, revenants and readers alike, on a voyage into new, strange, and wonderful territory. The girl detective must go to the underworld to solve the case of the tap-dancing bank robbers. A librarian falls in love with a girl whose father collects artificial noses. A dead man posts letters home to his estranged wife. Two women named Louise begin a series of consecutive love affairs with a string of cellists. A newly married couple become participants in an apocalyptic beauty pageant. Sexy blond aliens invade New York City. A young girl learns how to make herself disappear. These eleven extraordinary stories are quirky, spooky, and smart. They all have happy endings. Every story contains a secret prize. Each story was written especially for you.

Magic for Beginners — (2005) Publisher: Magic for Beginners is Kelly Link’s eagerly anticipated and critically acclaimed follow-up to her beloved debut, Stranger Things Happen. “Cumulatively weirder and wiser” (The Believer), this new story collection riffs on zombies, marriage, witches, superheroes, haunted convenience stores, and weekly apocalyptic poker parties, among other things. Link’s work is truly unique. Time Out New York called her stories “cross-genre gems,” and her admirers in the literary community — from Peter Straub and Karen Joy Fowler to Alice Sebold and Michael Chabon — reflect the amazing range that makes her style so special. Call it kitchen sink magical realism: Fantastic and bizarre but funny and down to earth, there is something for everyone in Magic for Beginners.

Pretty Monsters — (2008) Young adult. Publisher: Kelly Link has lit up adult literary publishing — and Viking is honored to publish her first YA story collection. Through the lens of Link’s vivid imagination, nothing is what it seems, and everything deserves a second look. From the multiple award-winning “The Faery Handbag,” in which a teenager’s grandmother carries an entire village (or is it a man-eating dog?) in her handbag, to the near-future of “The Surfer,” whose narrator (a soccer-playing skeptic) waits with a planeload of refugees for the aliens to arrive, Link’s stories are funny and full of unexpected insights and skewed perspectives on the world. Her fans range from Michael Chabon to Peter Buck of R.E.M. to Holly Black of Spiderwick Chronicles fame. Now teens can have their world rocked, too!

Pretty Monsters

Pretty Monsters is Kelly Link's latest short story collection aimed at young adults. My young adult phase passed a long time ago but I found this book to be as deep and packed as Link's Magic for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen.

The first thing that caught my eye is the overall aesthetic of the book. The jacket, designed by Will Staeble, is upbeat and eye-catching, whether it's simply the presentation of the blurbs or the text on the cover flap. Shaun Tan's art also precedes each story and there's an apt phrase or two below the neat and refined illustration.

As for the stories themselves, there are nine all in all, with one story original to this collection, the titular "Pretty Monsters." Most of the stories are recent, although there are a few reprints of stories from her earlier books (e.g., "Magic for Beginners" and "The Faery Handbag"). The featured stories are diverse — from the absurd and the surreal to the conventional. Each one packs a punch and while they are all quite lengthy, I'm amazed at how great they stand up to re-reading (because I'm a Link fan and I've encountered several of them before). Whether this is appropriate for young adults though remains to be seen. Perhaps what makes it apt for that audience is the fact that many of the protagonists are teens and Link does capture their mentality in some of the stories.

Kelly Link's featured piece, "Pretty Monsters," is written with an authentic young adult voice, whether it's the girl pining for her crush or the pressures of being part of a clique. For the most part, Link isn't heavy-handed in her storytelling and there are lots of nuances to the text. And then it all culminates to a powerful ending that has that distinctive Kelly Link style. Easily a great and memorable story.

Other stories I particularly enjoyed were "Monster" and "The Surfer." The former is a summer camp story full of excitement and confusion but it all boils down to the characterization of the one boy who doesn't fit in. Link ensnares the reader in an emotional ringer before unleashing the monster upon them and it's a delightful yet terrifying scene. The latter, on the other hand, lacks Link's trademark of the absurd or the unbelievable, but she makes up for it with good old-fashioned storytelling and excellent characterization.

Overall Pretty Monsters was a satisfying read. —Charles Tan
FanLit thanks Charles Tan from Bibliophile Stalker for contributing this guest review.

Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories — (2011) Young adult. Publisher: Imagine an altrnate universe where romance and technology reign. Where tinkerers and dreamers craft and re-craft a world of automatons, clockworks, calculating machines, and other marvels that never were. Where scientists and schoolgirls, fair folk and Romans, intergalactic bandits, utopian revolutionaries, and intrepid orphans solve crimes, escape from monstrous predicaments, consult oracles, and hover over volcanoes in steam-powered airships. Here, fourteen masters of speculative fiction, including two graphic storytellers, embrace the genre's established themes and refashion them in surprising ways and settings as diverse as Appalachia, Ancient Rome, future Australia, and alternate California. Visionaries Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant have invited all-new explorations and expansions, taking a genre already rich, strange, and inventive in the extreme and challenging contributors to remake it from the ground up. The result is an anthology that defies the genre even as it defines it.

Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories

Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories is a new young adult collection edited by veteran anthologists Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant. Featuring twelve conventional short stories and two graphic entries, Steampunk! showcases a wide variety of ideas and styles that fall under the steampunk umbrella. The collection is entertaining and is lent extra freshness by the variety of settings explored by the authors: none of the stories are set in Victorian London.

The book begins with “Some Fortunate Future Day” by Cassandra Clare. This is a creepy little story about a rather warped young girl who desires love but knows very little about it. The ending will leave you wondering, “How many times…”

Set in an alternate Wild West on another planet, Libba Bray’s “The Last Ride of the Glory Girls” follows a girl who goes undercover with a gang of female outlaws and finds her loyalties shifting toward them and away from the Pinkertons she works for. The narrative voice is terrific — I kept imagining the story being told by Hailee Steinfeld — and the religious cult that haunts her past is chilling.

“Clockwork Fagin” by Cory Doctorow is set in an oppressive orphanage for children maimed in factory accidents. Their keeper meets his untimely end, and the kids see a chance to seize their own destinies. The story is macabre, a bit twisted, and darkly funny, and ends in a surprisingly uplifting way.

The first of the two graphic entries is Shawn Cheng’s “Seven Days Beset by Demons.” I don’t think I quite “got” this one. I had trouble liking the protagonist, and while I enjoyed other stories in the anthology that revolved around unsympathetic characters, this one didn’t give me much to sink my teeth into except the emotional state of the protagonist. His reactions just seemed way overboard in regards to how briefly he’d known his love interest, but I’ll grant that this may have been an intentional decision related to the story’s Seven Deadly Sins theme.

Ysabeau S. Wilce offers a tale of early forensics and mad science in “Hand in Glove.” A detective struggles against her fellow officers’ reluctance to embrace newfangled methods of crime-solving as she investigates a mysterious murder spree. An enjoyable story.

“The Ghost of Cwmlech Manor” by Delia Sherman is a charming entry, a Gothic ghost story with a mechanical twist. It’s beautifully written and doesn’t go quite where you expect it to, in large part because of its spirited heroine who chafes at restrictions of both gender and class.

Elizabeth Knox’s “Gethsemane” is set in the South Pacific but is based, at least in part, on the 1902 eruption of Mt. Pelee in the West Indies island of Martinique. Knox follows four characters, each of whom has a story, and each of these stories is made up of a complex tangle of truth and lies. The lies start to unravel as disaster strikes Gethsemane, and the truths discovered are often tragic, but the process of learning them is satisfying for the reader.

“The Summer People” by Kelly Link is a story of fairies in Appalachia. The steampunk connection is a bit tenuous — you could remove the steampunk and still have essentially the same story — but it does provide a clever new look at why one shouldn’t take certain metals along while visiting the fairies. Even though it’s really more of a fairy story than a steampunk one, “The Summer People” is haunting; I think I’ll remember its twist and the rooms of the fairies’ house for a long time.

Garth Nix’s “Peace in Our Time” centers on an old man who at first seems doddering and innocent, but whose role in a horrific cataclysm unfolds gradually as he is interrogated by a young woman. An interesting character study.

Christopher Rowe’s “Nowhere Fast” is set in Kentucky in a post-apocalyptic future. Anti-technological beliefs have taken over, to the point of becoming repressive. Into this setting comes a young man in a device that isn’t at all exotic to us, but is shocking to the townspeople: a car. I thought this story was going somewhere darker than it actually went, but it’s a thought-provoking look at how any philosophy can be taken too far.

The second graphic entry is “Finishing School” by Kathleen Jennings. Engaging and well-drawn, “Finishing School” tells the story of a famous aviatrix’s first flight as seen through the eyes of her childhood friend, now a dentist. I enjoyed it and wished there were more of it; I wanted to see more of both women’s lives.

“Steam Girl” by Dylan Horrocks is set in our own time, as a teenage boy falls slowly and awkwardly in love with a geeky, outcast girl in his class. They bond over the graphic novels the girl writes, which relate the adventures of Steam Girl, an author avatar whose life is filled with planet-hopping high adventure. Meanwhile, they face bullying at school, and it also becomes evident that the Steam Girl yarns are more closely tied to their creator’s troubled real life than one might expect. “Steam Girl” is an absolutely beautiful story in which any high-school pariah — current or former — will see a little bit of him or herself.

Next is Holly Black’s “Everything Amiable and Obliging.” This story is set in an alternate Regency England where automata are employed as domestics and in other subservient positions. The narrator’s cousin falls in love with an automaton, and the narrator tries to scuttle the romance by proving the automaton is incapable of love. Like “Nowhere Fast,” this is a story I thought was going to go darker than it did. Black paints a disturbing scenario regarding the sentience (or not) and the free will (or not) of the robots, but ties it up in a way that seems fluffier than is warranted by the themes.

Closing out the anthology is M.T. Anderson’s “The Oracle Engine.” Anderson places his entry in an ancient Rome that never was. It’s much like the real, historical Rome — but these Romans have more advanced technology. They have flying machines, and it’s implied that they nuked Carthage. “The Oracle Engine” draws on the real-life history of the consul Crassus and uses that as the foundation for a terrific story of revenge. If you know your Greco-Roman mythology, it’s not hard to guess where this story is going, but Anderson makes the journey irresistible.

Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories is a solid anthology well worth picking up by any young adult (or not-so-young adult) reader interested in the steampunk genre. Especially satisfying were the complex characters who populate these tales and the diverse range of settings. My personal favorites were the entries by Link, Horrocks, and Anderson, but I thoroughly enjoyed the whole collection and have discovered some new authors to try. —Kelly Lasiter