Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link

Kelly Link's new collection of stories offers surprise and delight at every turn. Nobody I can think of writes like her. Her writing is a stew mixing magical realism, horror/science fiction, twilight zone, Marx brothers slapstick, and YA angst. Add a dash of Dashell Hammet's flair with words and your getting close to the pleasure of Link's writing. She achieves wonders.

Link is intrigued by the border between fiction and reality, the powers and limits of imagination. Her stories are often double, made up of strands with one strand serving as art and entertainment for the characthers in the other. In the novella length "Magic for Beginners," characters include "a renegade librarian and magician named Fox [who] is trying to save her world from thieves, murderers, cabalists, and pirates. Jeremy is a geek, athough he's a telegenic geek. Somebody should make a TV show about him."

By placing fiction alongside reality within a fiction, Link highlights our assumptions about art, reading, and stories. Within the world of the story above, Fox and her story are a television fiction; geeky, teenage Jeremy is the "real" character. After all, he's geeky and a teenager who finds girls a total mystery and worries about his parent's fragile marriage.

The "real" Jeremy is watching the fictional Fox; she isn't watching Jeremy, or anybody else for that matter. In distinguishing between reality and fiction,those who watch are real; those who are watched are the fictions. TV characters (and characters in stories, often enough?) seem to live lives of unrelieved excitement and drama and possibility.

Like most YA fiction, this is a novel in which the main character gets wise. Thus, Jeremy wonders "about what kind of television shows the characters in television shows watch. Television characters almost always have better haircuts, funnier friends, simpler attitudes toward sex. They marry magicians, win lotteries, have affairs with women who carry guns in their purses. Curious things happen to them on an hourly basis"(81).

Just when all seems clear in any story, Link mixes it up. In "Magic," Jeremy begins to receive calls from the fictional characters on the TV shows. In "The Surfer, after subtly and gently ridiculing a quasi-religious group awaiting the coming of UFO's, Link has UFOs appear. And, wondrous, erotic and new (at least to me)the UFOs prove: "The aliens' ships were lustrous and dark and flexible; something like sharks, if sharks were a hundred feet long and hung in the air, moving just a little, as is breathing"(274). These sharks from outer-space appear at the end of a story, while the narrator is using the latrine. Link has knack for putting the sublime right upside the daily and dreary.

Her characters share a vague religious yearning and impulse which seeks satisfaction from various "Gods". In "The Wizards of Perfil," in a post-apocalyptic environment, a young boy is sold as a servant to a mysterious band of wizards who live in a colony of high, story-book towers set in a marsh. He is assigned a specific wizard; he lives outside the tower and brings the wizard water every morning, but never sees him. Instead he leaves his offering outside the door of the room at the top of the tower. He stares through the key-hole. He leaves messages. He knocks "but no one answered. So obviously he's hard of hearing"(43). Halsa nevertheless begins to talk to him through the door. He begins to offer up his wishes to the wizard, until at the end of the story he discovers our gods are sometimes found in the strangest of places.