eBook, 266 pages
English language
Published Dec. 2, 2001 by Small Beer Press.
I first tried this collection years ago and DNFed it before I DNFed very often. But I also wasn’t reading weirder stuff yet. I know Kelly Link is well respected in weird fiction, so I wanted to give this another try.
I read a few stories this time around, and I’d say the weirdness is quite mild. And the stories themselves pretty boring. I enjoyed my recent read The Houseguest much more.
I usually am pretty opposed to short stories. They tail off just as things get interesting. But Kelly Link is different. Kelly Link doesn't really write stories -- short or otherwise -- her work is something completely different. She operates outside of the usual logic of narrative. Although, to be fair, perhaps my favorite of her works is the most conventional: The Specialists Hat, which I've read in other collections, is just so undeniably spooky. The atmosphere of dread is palpable, and Link sets it up perfectly, you read it thinking that everything might just turn out fine (even though I've read it before) and she gets you just at the last moment.
Her other works in this collection are more atmospheric riddles than stories, per se, but she does them well, with rich atmospheres and a sense of a consistent mythology just beyond the reader's grasp. There's just something …
I usually am pretty opposed to short stories. They tail off just as things get interesting. But Kelly Link is different. Kelly Link doesn't really write stories -- short or otherwise -- her work is something completely different. She operates outside of the usual logic of narrative. Although, to be fair, perhaps my favorite of her works is the most conventional: The Specialists Hat, which I've read in other collections, is just so undeniably spooky. The atmosphere of dread is palpable, and Link sets it up perfectly, you read it thinking that everything might just turn out fine (even though I've read it before) and she gets you just at the last moment.
Her other works in this collection are more atmospheric riddles than stories, per se, but she does them well, with rich atmospheres and a sense of a consistent mythology just beyond the reader's grasp. There's just something really nice about reading someone who's doing something no one else is.
Weird, surreal, unconventional fantasy short stories -- fantasy in the otherworldly sense, not in the magic/vampires/elves sense. There are some weak stories here and some are just 100% strange, but I was captivated and I'll definitely read more.
The stories in this collection all started with an interesting seed of an idea, and then manage to uniformly be completely and utterly bland.
It's possible that the point of the story was to take the unique, strange, and weird and portray it as being mundane. If that's so, it succeeded wildly, and managed to be one of the most uninteresting collection of stories ever.
They each start with that one interesting idea, and then completely fail to go anyway where it.
I read about three quarters of the book before bailing completely.
