“Ladies. Has it ever occurred to you that fairy tales aren’t easy on the feet?”
—“Travels with the Snow Queen”
Kelly Link writes Kelly Link stories. Over five brilliant short story collections—Stranger Things Happen (2001), Magic for Beginners (2005), Pretty Monsters (2008), Get in Trouble (2015), and White Cat, Black Dog (2023)—Link has carved out a unique niche, somewhere where the strands of fantasy, weird fiction, and the speculative combine and become inextricably entangled. These are stories in which the fairy tale and the mundane world we live in overlap and mix together, rendering both of them freshly uncanny.
Link sees genre as a box full of toys to be played with and discarded at will. Her stories are full of surprising left turns. Many are built on audacious mixtures of genres and tones that really ought not to work…but part of Link’s gift is how she makes the unexpected seem like an entirely natural part of the story. What could, in the hands of a lesser writer, come across as overly quirky or twee, in Link’s hands becomes a believable aspect of the fabric of the world of the story. Her characters are stuck in these worlds run by bizarre, humorous, or capricious rules, but simply have to find a way to live their lives as best they can despite this. So we get stories about the staff of a convenience store located on the lip of a zombie-producing void, or of a woman with an extra shadow who is coping badly with her husband from a neighbouring pocket universe leaving her.
A writer as idiosyncratic as Link might run the risk of being underrated, but fortunately for us, Link is widely respected both within genre circles—having won a Hugo Award, a Nebula Award, a World Fantasy Award, and an Otherwise Award (formerly the James Tiptree Jr. Award) among others—and by the mainstream literary world, having won a MacArthur “Genius” Grant, while Get In Trouble was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. As if this weren’t enough, Link along with her husband Gavin Grant co-edited the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series and small press fantasy magazine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and the two of them manage Small Beer Press, one of the best and most highly respected indie genre publishers in the US.
“Not that you should believe this story. Promise me that you won’t believe a word.”
—“The Faery Handbag”
Part of what makes Link’s stories so darkly compelling is that she understands that stories are inherently untrustworthy. Traditional forms of storytelling like fairy tales, folk tales, myths and legends endure in part because their very format sets up a series of expectations in the listener. Perhaps the same could be said of more modern genres like fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Link’s stories revel in the frisson generated when a fairy tale wrong-foots you by not behaving like a fairy tale. So a story like “The Faery Handbag” starts from a recognisable world of charity shops and Buffy reruns to morph into a tall tale about a magical handbag, a portal fantasy about a missing boyfriend, and a moving reflection on the loss of one’s grandparents and coming to terms with one’s cultural inheritance.
“Secret Identity” is set in a world in which superheroes exist, but the possibility of developing superpowers is just one more thing the teenaged protagonist struggles with in her attempt to develop her adult persona in the shadow of her older sister. And “The Game of Smash and Recovery” is told like a fairy tale about lost siblings who must look after each other now that their parents have disappeared, before revealing its characters to be starship-inhabiting AIs on a secret interstellar mission. These are stories that delight in genre fiction tropes and ideas, but refuse to play by any genre’s established rules.
“I mean, people say something is like a fairy tale all the time …. And what they mean is somebody falls in love and gets married. Happy ever after. But that house, those foxes, it really is a fairy tale.”
—“The Summer People”
The fairy tale is Link’s favourite toy, a mode she returns to again and again in various surprising guises. Her latest collection, White Cat, Black Dog, is particularly interesting in this regard, in that each story is explicitly linked to a particular fairy tale, allowing the reader to trace the bones of the original underneath the frequently radical new shapes into which Link has twisted them. But this is a game Link has been playing throughout her career. “The Summer People” incorporates elements of “Bluebeard” into a story about a magical house inhabited by the fair folk and the woman who has reluctantly inherited the burden of looking after it. Like “Bluebeard” it becomes a story about escape, but in this case more from inherited obligations than a murderous husband.
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“Catskin” draws on all the fairy stories about children kidnapped by witches to tell a gruesome tale of murder and revenge and magical cats. (Magical cats recur throughout Link’s work.) And “Skinder’s Veil” is a remarkable story that encompasses Snow-White and Rose-Red and various refugees from other fairy stories in a tale about a magical house and confronting one’s own mortality. What’s truly remarkable is that, whatever new shapes or bold subversions Link contorts the stories into, such is her command of the tone and feel of fairy tales that the stories always feel entirely natural, as if their surprising twists, juxtapositions, and repositioning with our own world were always a part of how fairy tales work.
Link is an explicitly feminist writer, and her stories frequently interrogate the traditional gender roles espoused by many fairy or folk stories. Link sees these as an opportunity both to critically engage with the attitudes of the originals and to playfully subvert them. A story like “Travels with the Snow Queen” follows Gerda—a girl whose boyfriend has been stolen by the titular Snow Queen—on her quest not so much to get him back as to reclaim her own agency. The story is full of hilarious one-liners, thoughtful interrogations of the fairy stories that reduce women to prizes to be won by a male hero regardless of the suffering they are put through, and wonderfully sarcastic asides, including one where she imagines setting up a travel agency to help these women. In “Origin Story,” a woman in a small town who winds up hooking up with the town’s big hero whenever he comes back home, but then gets left behind when he goes back to work, reflects on the bum deals that Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz and Sleeping Beauty got in their stories as she tries to cover up the hurt of her own lot.
These stories manage to be witty takedowns of the patriarchal attitudes found in fairy stories as well as compelling and moving character studies. “Most of My Friends are Two-Thirds Water” opens with a Ray Bradbury quote about sexy Martian women, and applies similar techniques to early science fiction, creating a wry scenario in which sexy blonde aliens invade New York, recounted with withering cynicism by the decidedly not-blonde narrator. Other stories, like the remarkable “The New Boyfriend,” explore the dark side of budding female desire whilst poking fun at Twilight-mania via custom-made robot Boyfriends that come in Vampire, Werewolf, or Ghost varieties.
“Claire’s face is stubborn. ‘When you’re Dead’, she says, ‘you stay up all night long.’
‘When you’re dead,’ the babysitter snaps, ‘it’s always very cold and damp, and you have to be very, very quiet or else the Specialist will get you.’
‘This house is haunted,’ Claire says.
‘I know it is,’ the babysitter says. ‘I used to live here.’”
—“The Specialist’s Hat”
Link’s deftness at pulling the rug from under the reader makes her a thoroughly effective writer of horror and weird fiction. Whilst few of her stories are easily categorizable as horror, many of them take quite a bit of joy in the macabre, and some of them veer to the downright terrifying. Ghosts are another recurring element in Link’s fiction, though they rarely manifest as traditional hauntings. Often Link’s readers and characters alike don’t know which character is a ghost until it’s too late. But then, ghosts are far from the only thing that haunts us. The protagonist in “I Can See Right Through You,” a movie star who got his big break playing a sexy vampire, is haunted by his failed relationship with his best friend and co-star, a horrendous mistake that ended in the death of a young vulnerable girl, and his own stardom…and that’s before his visit to the set of his co-star’s nudist ghosthunter reality show brings him into contact with an actual ghost.
“The Specialist’s Hat,” perhaps Link’s most frightening story, can be read as a series of nested hauntings, in which everyone and everything—from the identical twin girls left in a haunted house, to their father, to the house itself—is doomed by its past to become prey to a ghastly supernatural entity. “The White Road” follows a troupe of actors across a post-apocalyptic America where the dead have returned to haunt the living with guilt. In general, the reader would be wise to mistrust most of Link’s narrators, especially where the supernatural is concerned. Yet Link is just as capable of using the supernatural to explore the poetry and banality of the human condition. In “Louise’s Ghost,” Louise comes home to find the ghost of a naked man in her bedroom—one that she simply can’t evict. And in “The Hortlak,” the horror of living next to a void that produces zombies is secondary to Eric’s job at a convenience store and his unrequited love for Charley, a local girl who works at the vets putting down strays. In Link’s hands, horror becomes yet another tool in her complex and ever-shifting arsenal of storytelling.
“If you can’t be honest with your best friend’s Vampire Boyfriend, who can you be honest with?”
—”The New Boyfriend”
Link’s stories are wondrously strange works of imagination, as beautifully written as they are sharply intelligent. But what makes the stories land so effectively is her way with characters. Link centres the human experience. Throughout all the marvellous, strange, and frightening situations her characters find themselves in, they still have to go to work or school in the morning, they still have to deal with falling in and out of love, they still have to phone their parents and do their laundry. This grounding of her characters in the recognisable hopes, fears, and anxieties of our everyday lives helps make Link’s stories relatable, no matter how strange or outlandish they get.
Link’s characters are frequently storytellers, compulsive liars, or fantasists. At the end of the day, like all of us, they use stories as a way to process the world around them, to make sense of a strange and unknowable world. Link has a tendency to leave her characters before the nice clean fairy tale ending as well, seeming to prefer the uneasiness and messiness of the ambiguous ending, reflecting our own lives, in which we rarely get things wrapped up neatly in a bow. As with real life, her characters get closure on some things and not on others, but the framing of their stories as fairy tale or folk tale gives the characters a chance to reach for the ending they’d wish for, though they might end up with the one that they fear. This, in itself, tells us something about both the characters, and us as readers, the endings to which we aspire and expect. After all, we all know how fairy stories end, don’t we? Link’s stories reply with a wry grin, “Are you sure?”
Jonathan Thornton has written for the websites The Fantasy Hive, Fantasy Faction, and Gingernuts of Horror. He works with mosquitoes and is working on a PhD on the portrayal of insects in speculative fiction.
