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I just finished reading Kelly Link’s newest book of magical short stories, White Cat, Black Dog. To get to the good part first: I absolutely loved its blend of magic, fear, wonder, and the bizarre.
Magical and magic are exactly the words I want here. Link has always dabbled in the realm of the surreal. The characters in the worlds she has created live in ridiculously mundane settings, like the all-night convenience store in the story, “The Hortlak” in her marvelous Magic for Beginners collection. But these settings and the characters that move around like shadows in their worlds are always surrounded and beset by the fantastical. In the case of that convenience store, it just so happens to sit right at the edge of a void spitting out a steady stream of zombies.
In her newest short story collection, Link takes an already fantastical setting, the world of fairy tales, and reimagines them in strange and, yes, mundane ways. While there may be kings looking to have their sons prove their worth via a series of feats of wonder, there are also white cats making a living by cultivating Cannabis sativa on farms out in the middle of nowhere. A man just trying to finish his thesis, despite having an inconsiderate and sex-starved roommate, also housesits for a wondrous being that has given him a series of persnickety house rules that feel right at home in any fairy tale.
When I first started reading the stories, I tried to map them to the fairy tales they were based off of. But I soon discovered that that was a ridiculous notion. I was in the hands of a master weaver of story tapestries. Her threads were varied and constantly swirled backward and forward creating entirely new worlds. The point is not to look too hard at the threads to see if you can see the pattern. As the white cat says in the first story: “The mechanics of how I can speak are really of no great interest, and I’m afraid that I don’t really understand it myself, in any case.”
The point is to let yourself get woven into the tapestry itself so that you can feel the rich and complex characters whirl themselves around you. And this felt like one of the major themes that I got from the book—giving yourself up and letting yourself flow with the fear, madness, horror, love, and passion that is out there. Ghosts make numerous visits to the characters in the book, whether they are ghosts of fear or past, lost loves, they are always there, right at the edge of your perception. You could run away in horror, or you could mimic her characters and look at them with curiosity.
I found some of the stories a bit colder and harder to get lost within. For me, that was “The Game of Smash and Recovery.” But I won’t tell you want my favorite tale was. I think these stories do such a brilliant job of being multifaceted and reflecting back to us our own thoughts about what makes us love and what makes us fight for love, what makes us live and what makes us fight to live.
And in all of these tales of strangeness and the mundane, it’s her razor-sharp observations that had me nodding my head in recognition: “Pity the introvert with the face of an introvert or a kindergarten teacher. Like the werewolf, we are uneasy in human spaces and human company, though we wear a human skin.” In a few turns of phrase, she turns a recognizable annoyance (being the person who doesn’t want people to talk to them but sadly has a face that invites it) into the fantastical.
Suffice it to say, I loved the book, and I highly recommend it to lovers of the strange and unexpected. And I can’t wait for her next book, which is coming out in February, The Book of Love.
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