posted on 22 Jan 2017

Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link

US born Kelly Link is a writer who has gathered an impressive collection of awards off the back of a small handful of short story collections – Pretty Monsters, published in 2008, being her third and carrying pretty extravagant endorsements from the likes of Neil Gaiman, Alice Sebold, Sarah Waters and Audrey Niffenegger. She’s also a genre-defying author – fantasy, the supernatural, magic realism and gothic all get tossed about when critics discuss her work.

She’s also ambiguous when it comes to her audience – Pretty Monsters certainly feels to me to be aimed at older teenagers, the Twilighter generation if you will, but I suspect she also crosses over into an older young adult readership. Certainly her plots, her subject matter and her tendency to dip into the darker side can make her a challenging read for teenagers.

I think this collection runs the range of her interests from the classic fantasy territory of The Wizards of Perfil  to the more macabre supernatural zombie territory of The Wrong Grave and then challenging the reader with the more subtle and sophisticated Magic For Beginners, which is probably my favourite story in the collection.

None of her stories allow you to relax and you soon become accustomed to expecting the unexpected and no potential twist goes untwisted. I have to confess that it is this aspect of her work that eventually I found really exasperating and the feeling that you were getting strategically planned kookiness began to get in the way of the storytelling.

In a 2010 review of the book by Tom Lee he captured this perfectly when he described the collection in this way:

Despite the stories' obvious qualities, the carnival of weirdness can become wearying. Ultimately, they play to the experience and fertile imagination of the bookish, cultish teenager rather than those looking for the next Kafka or Borges.

There is no doubt that Kelly Link can write a compelling tale and I also have no doubt that for a teenage audience she is likely to be a cult figure – she may already be for all I know.

 This sense of cultishness is further enhanced by the fact that the book includes a series of incidental illustrations by the brilliant Shaun Tan providing what he calls ‘decorations’ but which are in reality something more substantial than that. This makes the book a lovely thing to have with its black and yellow lightly laminated board covers and black stained page end block.

I’m certainly not the target market for this collection and so it’s not surprising that I didn’t really warm to it. But, if you like the thrill of the macabre and you want stories that are modern day tales that mix Edgar Alan Poe with Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected stopping on the way to reference The Twilight Zone, then this may be the book for you.

Terry Potter

January 2017