Green Girls, Black Dogs, and Comfortable Shoes

If literary talent were traded on the stock exchange, I’d urge you to invest in Kelly Link as soon as possible. I guess that is what I’m urging you to do. Buy this book. Immediately. Don’t be surprised if, after reading it, you want to buy a copy for everyone you like.

Stranger Things Happen is Link’s first collection of short fiction, although her stories have been appearing in various magazines since the late ’90s. Link is apparently not prolific, but the strength of the stories collected here establishes her as one of the most consistently intriguing and inventive of contemporary fantasists, as well as an exceptionally fine writer.

These stories are unquestionably fantasies, but think Angela Carter rather than Ursula Le Guin. Link shares Carter’s penchant for the surreal and her interest in fairy tales, but this collection establishes a sensibility that is distinctly and unmistakably her own. These are wonderful stories about travel, feet and footwear, and the intricacies of relationships. They combine horror, humor, and surrealism with fragments of myths and popular culture, all shot through with a deceptively simple but utterly engaging narrative voice. I hesitate to use the word quirky, which often implies affectation. Endearingly odd might be a better description. These stories concern a woman who only seduces cellists, a farmer with a collection of artificial noses, and a group of tap-dancing bank robbers. Those unwilling to tolerate ambiguity in fiction may find these stories frustrating. Link resolutely refuses to reduce the complexities of her stories to an orderly rationalism, and many of the central images and happenings of these stories are never fully “explained.” Incredibly, it almost always works, and these stories use their very indeterminacy to create a powerful sense of tone and mood.

Stranger Things Happen
Kelly Link
Small Beer Press

None of which would matter very much if not for Link’s true strength: her understanding of fantasy’s potential to give unique shape to such basic human realities as longing, isolation, and the need for love. Even when they are couched in surreal imagery or unconventional narrative forms, these stories reveal a directness and emotional honesty that is all too rare.

Although not all the stories here are up to the same level of accomplishment, the collection displays a remarkably consistent level of quality. Of the eleven fine stories in Stranger Things Happen, there are a number of standouts.

“Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose” is an exceptional piece—a series of letters written by a dead man to the wife whose name he can’t quite remember. Link captures a tone of sorrow, regret, and furtive loneliness in a series of superb and often unsettling images: a deserted beach and a hissing ocean surf that increasingly suggests a dead cat. A painfully honest story about the small cruelties and betrayals of a relationship.

“Travels With the Snow Queen,” which won the Tiptree Award in 1997, reinvents the Hans Christian Andersen story in order to illuminate the pain of a failed relationship. Like the subject it explores, Link’s story is by turns numbing, desperate, and anguished as the narrator travels a trail of broken glass in search of the lover who has abandoned her. Along the way, she finds that she has outgrown her need for him.

“The Specialists’ Hat,” winner of the 1999 World Fantasy Award, is a classic ghost story in the tradition of M. R. James. This story of twin girls, a haunted house, and a babysitter who may not be quite what she appears is a masterpiece of persistent creepiness and a slowly escalating sense of dread. 

“The Girl Detective” is a stunning piece that eschews both linear narrative and a stable point of view, offering instead a collage of images that are part homage to the resourceful girl detective (you know the one), part recasting of the fairy tale of the twelve dancing princesses, and part psychological exploration of the effects of childhood loss. It’s a tour de force that is simultaneously baffling and brilliant, humorous and poignant.

These pieces are the cream of the crop, but there’s plenty of other good stuff here as well. It’s a landmark collection, and if my instincts are right, it will emerge as one of the best of 2001. If you’re looking for stories that are literate, smart, sad, funny, and creepy—often at the same time—don’t let this one pass you by.

This review was previously published in a slightly different form in the Louisville Eccentric Observer.