So I recently said no one would care about what I have to say regarding this book cause it’s not like I’ve seen it mentioned anywhere. But I’ve been thinking about that since, and y’know what? Be the change you wanna see in the world or whatever. So once again (“Who are you?” someone said), I’m inflicting my opinions on the unsuspecting.
This is a short story collection. Unlike some, this isn’t a post hoc agglomeration for readers’ convenience. This is the *Dubliners* genre of anthology: written as a unit and meant to be read together in a particular order. The shtick here is fairy tale retellings, but… well, you’ll see.
I’d read a few Kelly Link short stories before, in isolation, and I’m looking forward to her debut novel in a couple weeks. Her thing is weird speculative fiction, like the less hammy *Twilight Zone* episodes. Some short stories I quite like; others are more interesting than enjoyable. But this is my first time tackling one of her anthologies whole hog. So buckle in, cause we’re looking at it one. Story. At. A. Time!
# “The White Cat’s Divorce”
This and the next one are the most straightforward fairy tale retellings, both in the sense of closely following their original models and in how they imitate the structure, style, and tropes of fairy tales. Here you get your typical tale of three siblings sent on a quest. Our sympathies are of course meant to be with the youngest, the underdog, even though he keeps cheating with magic.
The charm of the story is in transposing it to a modern day setting. Instead of a king’s sons, we get a CEO’s. The enchanted cats don’t live in a castle; they grow pot in a greenhouse. You get the idea. It’s funny, but I the result of using these fairy tale tropes in this context, for me, is a parody of our world more than one of fairy tales. Not to get all Marxist literary critic on y’all, but I mainly see this story through the lenses of class. The ~~king’s~~ CEO’s concerns are so divorced from a regular person’s, he is so alienated from everyone around him yet so blissfully unaware of it, and he is so utterly self-absorbed, that he ends up coming across as a kind of pitiable yet comic villain. His fixation on immortality being depicted as a manifestation of his extreme egoism felt very Le Guin-esque to me.
# “Prince Hat Underground”
This is based on the Norwegian fairy tale “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” but the basic premise of regaining a lover through a trip to the underworld (a *katabasis*, for my fellow pedants), should be familiar to anyone who’s come across Orpheus and Eurydice, or even Cupid and Psyche, or a bunch of others. So again, we get a bunch of fairy tale tropes and structural conventions, like the rule of threes or a coterie of supernatural beings and colorful strangers being inexplicably helpful to the protagonist (this gets called out in the story itself!), granted a playful absurdity by the modern day context. Even hell here is presented as a kind of goth suburbia.
The most conventional of the stories in my book, it drags a bit in places. Perhaps it could have stood being shorter, but I still enjoyed it and the last few lines give an air of sinister subversion to what is otherwise a fairly familiar quest.
# “The White Road”
This one’s a trip, literally and figuratively. By this point you might think you’ve got the collection figured out, but starting here, the stories get weirder, and the fairy tale collection much looser.
At first I thought the setting was historical, but eventually I realized it is in fact post-apocalyptic. This is the one story told in first person, and perhaps as a result it has the most distinct feel–I’m a sucker for a unique narrative voice, so that’s right up my alley. We don’t know exactly how the apocalypse happened (cause everyone knows, so the narrator doesn’t feel the need to explain it), but based on the current state of the world, it was supernatural in nature. This story stands out also because it is one of two that isn’t set in our everyday world with some speculative elements, and the subtle, indirect, and incomplete reveal of the setting is a joy to watch unfold.
Except this is also a horror story, so it is quite grim. Why is a boarding house keeping a corpse in the open? Why does the protagonists being actors have to do with them being safe(r) travelling between towns? Why doesn’t anyone use electronics, even though phones and such are within living memory? What’s up with this White Road people keep seeing but only out of the corners of their eyes?
It reminded me a great deal of when I recently ran the *Ten Candles* RPG; it’s got that same vibe. Easily in my top two from the collection!
# “The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear”
This one’s weeeeeeeeird. Or at least it seems so until you realize what the speculative element is; the story doesn’t quite spell it out for you. A college professor gets trapped out of town after a conference because her flights keep getting cancelled. She worries about her wife, who apparently looks almost exactly like her, her daughter, who keeps having nightmares about a clogged toilet, an appointment back home she cannot miss, intense smells that she tries to hide from by swimming day and night in a chlorine-infused hotel pool…
This story feels like my nightmares. Nothing all that horrible happens in it, but the mood is so oppresively mundane, such a dull shade of gray, even though everything is slanted and bizarre. It left me feeling more unease than the more explicitly horrific tale that preceded it. That’s an accomplishment, to be clear!
What’s going on with the main character seems fairly obvious by the end, but I’m still not sure what the connection is between the main character and the source fairy tale (which gets loosely retold by a character within this story) or of the bizarre doppelganger deal with the wife. It is striking that all the characters, even the minor ones, are female, but I’m not entirely sure what to make of it. Definitely one of the most thought provoking entries in the collection, worth a reread and some more mulling over.
# “The Game of Smash and Recovery”
This is the only sci fi story in the collection. It is also the worst of the bunch. I’m sorry! It’s supposed to be a retelling of Hansel and Gretel, which you can see if you squint, but it is such a mess. The other stories are strange, sure, and because of that and the author’s praiseworthy refusal to spoonfeed everything to the reader they can be confusing at times. But this one isn’t confusing because it’s strange. It honestly just feels rushed, particularly the second half. If “Prince Hat Underground” drags, this one starts at a nice jog then sprints to the end.
It doesn’t help that, unlike in the previous two stories, the conclusion feels less like a slow, careful reveal of information that lets the reader form their own opinion about what’s going on. Instead, it’s more like one of those gotcha Shyamalan twists: overly fond of its own cleverness yet still somehow predictable. There *is* stuff to enjoy here, in the early bits most of all, but it doesn’t quite come together for me.
You may notice I haven’t made any direct references to the plot here. That’s because it is quite short and figuring out what’s going on is kind of it. Hard to talk about it without spoiling it.
# “The Lady and the Fox”
I quite like the Tam Lin story, and this is a sweet, modern day retelling. Like “Prince Hat Underground,” it is a more conventional romantic tale. I saw a reviewer describe it as YA, since it is about a teenage girl falling in love with a handsome, older, supernatural stranger. But that’s basically Tam Lin (the more consensual versions, at least), so I guess they were doing YA back in the sixteenth century.
Don’t tell anyone, but I’m a hopeless romantic at heart, and particularly sensitive to stories of young love. This one does it for me. I dig the teenage awkwardness of it, not just between the girl and her crush but also the best friend who’s got a thing for her. Based on the Kelly Link I’ve read outside of this collection, she seems to have a knack for this sort of thing.
Also I wrote my Master’s on fox folklore so I’ve got a soft spot for the critters.
# “Skinder’s Veil”
My other favorite! This one’s long, practically a novella. A grad student gets a housesitting gig out in the middle of nowhere. Great chance to concentrate on his dissertation, he says, not realizing he is in sort of a horror story. The real horror, though, is that even locking himself up in the countryside without wifi doesn’t stop him from procrastinating. Been there, my dude.
Seriously, though, his experiences in the house are, for the most part, more weird than horrific (take a shot!). There’s a long lead up to them, during which he gets to know his douchey roommate’s haunted girlfriend (Does this have anything to do with the sort-of haunted house he is driving towards? Good question!) and learns the house’s fairy tale rules from the friend he’s taking over for, who very reasonably, considering the price of real estate nowadays, doesn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth. Then he hooks up with a creepy stranger, hangs out with a bear, hears some microfiction in the form of grim suburban fairy stories (or whimsical suburban horror stories, depending on how you look at it), and sees a wraith or something, plus the black dog from the collection’s title.
Really, this one feels expansive and epic and brings it all together. Not quite as conventional as “The White Cat’s Divorce,” “Prince Hat Underground,” and “The Lady and the Fox,” not as odd as “The White Road,” “The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear,” and “The Game of Smash and Recovery,” but mixing elements seen throughout. I compared this collection to *Dubliners*, and this does have a “The Dead” kind of vibe to it in terms of its place in the collection… and thematically, in fact.
It also taught me valuable life lessons, namely that the cure for procrastination is tripping balls.
by Gwydden