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.
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.
