Kelly Link and the Freedom of Submitting to the Surreal
I just finished reading Kelly Link’s newest book of magical short stories, White Cat, Black Dog. To get to the good part first: I absolutely loved its blend of magic, fear, wonder, and the bizarre.
Magical and magic are exactly the words I want here. Link has always dabbled in the realm of the surreal. The characters in the worlds she has created live in ridiculously mundane settings, like the all-night convenience store in the story, “The Hortlak” in her marvelous Magic for Beginners collection. But these settings and the characters that move around like shadows in their worlds are always surrounded and beset by the fantastical. In the case of that convenience store, it just so happens to sit right at the edge of a void spitting out a steady stream of zombies.
In her newest short story collection, Link takes an already fantastical setting, the world of fairy tales, and reimagines them in strange and, yes, mundane ways. While there may be kings looking to have their sons prove their worth via a series of feats of wonder, there are also white cats making a living by cultivating Cannabis sativa on farms out in the middle of nowhere. A man just trying to finish his thesis, despite having an inconsiderate and sex-starved roommate, also housesits for a wondrous being that has given him a series of persnickety house rules that…
