Current Reading
July 23rd, 2009
Stranger Things Happen, by Kelly Link. Wow, these stories are amazing.
I keep hearing about Kelly Link (also, she and Gavin Grant published one of my stories in their zine) but I never read her stuff before. My friend says her stories feel like dreams. The trouble is, whenever I hear that stories (or movies, or whatever) are like dreams, it turns out they’re actually like a lot of boring random stuff that makes no sense. So saying that reading a story feels like dreaming doesn’t mean what it ought to.
I would say the stories feel like childhood. Not childhood as in “a state of blissful innocence when we all had lots of time on our hands,” but childhood the way it really was, creepy and portentous. Yes, portentous is the word–when I was a child I always felt that something marvelous or dreadful was about to happen to me, and all details of the present became portents of that imminent event. That’s the mood of these stories, too.
I always say that I don’t like short stories, I never read short stories, etc. I recently realized that’s no longer true. I’ve been reading a lot of short fiction this year.
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