Kelly Link is the author of four short-story collections: Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, Pretty Monsters (for young adults), and, most recently, Get in Trouble. At least yearly, I reread “Travels with the Snow Queen,” a story about fairy tales, robber girls, and talking reindeer that also manages to be one of the most accurate renderings of unrequited love and wanderlust I’ve encountered. “Ladies,” the narrator snaps at one point, “Has it ever occurred to you that fairy tales aren’t easy on the feet?” It’s this snap, this practicality, this awareness of the body behind the words, that distinguishes Link’s work within the recent (and not so recent) trend of retelling fairy tales and ancient myths and superhero movies. Her characters, even when they’re zombies or vampires, are utterly human. “Monsters—” her work seems to say, gleeful as a glossy magazine, “They’re just like us!” And they are, only more so.
Her fabulist leanings have earned her comparisons to contemporaries like Kevin Brockmeier and Karen Russell (who calls Link “darkly funny, sexy, frightening”), but I’d also recommend her work to fans of Amy Hempel, Lorrie Moore, and the great Grace Paley. Like these writers, Link has an ear for the threat in everyday language. “I don’t bite,” a mother says to her daughter’s boyfriend in “Water Off a Black Dog’s Back,” but a book has already been shredded, a nose torn off. The explanations offered do not satisfy. Explanations rarely do, in Link’s stories: they prickle or pique or simply don’t exist. Readers must be content, instead, with settings like puzzles to be solved; with characters who are canny and brave and in deep, deep trouble; with sentences like teeth: unsettling on their own; put together, a weapon.
Her readers are legion, and loyal. Link is so beloved by her fans that she makes that ubiquitous epithet, “cult-favorite,” seem eerie in its potential for literal truth. I was fifteen minutes early for her reading at my local bookstore, but the place was already packed, and the audience wasn’t just large but giddy, abuzz with the kind of frenetic energy you have when you’re ready—expecting—to be delighted by what comes next. The poet Raymond McDaniel introduced Link: “We don’t know what we’re in for,” he joked, and that’s the pleasure. Link read from one of my favorites in the new collection, “I Can See Right Through You,” an intricately structured story about aging movie stars, sex tapes, ghost hunters, and regret. The piece is Link at her creepiest, but it is also deeply sad, no special effects needed. “You could, perhaps, imagine that there is a supernatural explanation for these things,” Link writes, “but that would be wishful thinking.” What story, after all, isn’t a ghost story? We’re all haunted by someone, by something.
Fairy tales, myths, legends, and tropes strike me as similar to the magical handbag or the tent you write into your story “The Summer People”—in that they’re bigger in than out. We can throw all manner of stuff into them and they can take it, carry that weight, despite their skeletal structure. It seems to me, though, that you’re not only packing these handbags, you’re stitching them together and running them up a flagpole, or making them into hats instead.
Is this a conscious impulse? Is it a matter of keeping yourself (or your reader) interested in a story that’s been told a dozen different ways before? When does a source material feel particularly open to you? Are there any that feel closed?
Stories are, of course, much bigger on the inside, especially when the reader and the writer have both read sufficient other stories. The moment you put in a reference to a fairytale, or pull a strand out of the superhero genre of story, or stitch in a line from a book or poem, those other stories are going to enter the particular thing that you’re doing. The story expands.
There’s another thing going on, as well, which is that the only real reference point we have (as writers or readers) for the fantastic is other stories: books, movies, oral tradition, ballads. So of course all of these representations connect up, sometimes (often?) even when the writer is unaware of stories or traditions that the reader has access to. Because I’ve been reading the latest book, I’ll mention Charlie Stross’s Laundry series, which is a funny and smart mashup of Lovecraftian mythos and James Bond-style espionage novels. Writing your own stuff often means recognizing patterns that, in combination, will give you your own material to work with.
And look, there are all different sorts of readers. I don’t expect everyone to like what I like to do. That would be weird! But for what it’s worth, when I start a new story, often I’m not particularly interested in what I’m writing. Writing the story is the long, mostly tedious, occasionally enjoyable process of finding an interesting direction and figuring out how to point myself and readers that away. Figuring out how to move the story along at the right speed by shaping sentences in certain ways.
I’ve been mulling over the question of source materials—I have no idea! Certain kinds of story shapes, or patterns, or source materials, I guess, appeal at certain moments. I know that I wrote a handful of zombie stories at one particular point, because I was watching (and rewatching) all the zombie movies I could find. But did I want to write zombie stories because I watched the movies, or did I watch the movies because I was suddenly interested in the idea of zombies and how people told stories about them? If I try to come up with a list of stories that I don’t want to tell, I guess it would include the serial killer genre. (Even if I’m almost done watching the first season of Hannibal.)
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