his collection of stories is the second to appear under Link's name, after the well-received and critically applauded Stranger Things Happen (2001). And while this book cannot burst upon the field with the novelty and force of its older sister—simply because we all know by now what a wonderful and soi-disant writer Link is—it still delivers just as much of a fabulist charge as its predecessor.
(The current volume features two never-before-seen stories, "Some Zombie Contingency Plans" and the title piece. But, unfortunately, the latter was not included as part of the advance reviewer's edition. It's safe to say, however, that in all likelihood it lives up to the high standards of its peers.)
The first tale in the book, "The Hortlak," is set in the All-Night Convenience store, a place typical of its type, except for a few minor quirks. The two men who run it, Eric and Batu, live on the premises, sleeping in storage closets. The store is located on the edge of the Ausible Chasm, a gulf populated with zombies. And the store's best customer is a woman named Charley, who has a car filled with doggie ghosts. Nothing too strange, in other words. Can Eric's unrequited love for Charley flourish in such circumstances? Maybe if those damn Canadians quit interrupting him with their requests for Mountain Dew.
"The Cannon" is another love story of sorts, involving not only the love of a man for a woman named Venus Shebby, but the love of a man for a giant cannon used for shooting Venus Shebby and others off into the sky.
Genevieve is an older teenage girl with a most peculiar grandmother. Hailing from the exotic and vanished country of Baldeziwurlekistan, Grandmother Zofia possesses "The Faery Handbag" that lends its name to this story. Inside the handbag resides an entire dominion, protected by a demon dog. The handbag is Genevieve's inheritance—if she can keep it safe.
Henry and Catherine and their two children are sick of Manhattan. They find a lovely house in upstate New York and move in. But the tutelary "Stone Animals" that flank their front door have certain ideas about how life should be led, and that way of life is not necessarily compatible with human sanity. "Catskin" is a postmodern rendering of "Puss-in-Boots," conflated with many other potent fairy-tale archetypes, producing a cautionary tale about fate, revenge and the destiny of a boy named Small.
An ex-con nicknamed "Soap" is fixated on the possibility of attack by hypothetical hordes of the roaming undead, to the point where he is always mentally formulating "Some Zombie Contingency Plans." When he crashes a house party and insinuates himself into the embrace of the hostess, a young woman, she is dragged into his creepy paranoia. And finally, "Lull" is a series of nested stories, beginning with a group of men playing poker, and expanding to include time travel and alien invasion conducted in "an attic full of stars."
An electic, absurdist fantasist
Kelly Link's work occupies that exotic, hybrid terrain that is neither one pure thing nor another. Like a Venn diagram of dozens of overlapping circles, her work flourishes by incorporating the best of many worlds. Sharp-edged mimetic and naturalistic touches, SF and fantasy and horror tropes, surrealism, Gen-X slacker riffs, avant-pop—these forms and many others are distilled and blended into a potent bricolage kind of fiction. Imagine film director Richard Linklater collaborating with writer Sylvia Townsend Warner (The Kingdoms of Elfin [1977]). Or George Alec Effinger working with the lowbrow artist known as Niagara. Or Philip K. Dick conspiring with the musician Beck. These are the kind of hip, juicy, exciting fusions that Link's work evokes. Her art is absolutely of the moment, nothing old-fashioned or stodgy about it. She represents a hopeful and youthful new direction for this kind of fiction, call it whatever you will.
At the same time, Link is very respectful of genre. A story like "Stone Animals," for all its absurdist touches, nods gracefully and gratefully toward Shirley Jackson, Lisa Tuttle and all the other great writers who have dealt with this material in the past. "Lull"—with its wonderful imagery of a house full of female replicants in all stages of age and color and development, and the confused husband who must deal with them—resonates beautifully with Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers (1955).
And likewise, Link has learned much from such literary figures as Robert Coover, John Barth, Donald Barthelme and the other avant-garde fantasists of the '60s. By fusing their advances with the solid work done by the genre folks, she synthesizes a peace treaty between the sometimes opposed but always subterraneanly allied forms. At last, after decades of oftentimes ill-sorted mutant offspring, the holy marriage between literary fabulism and genre writing has resulted in a hardy offspring.
