Kelly Link, Pretty Monsters (Viking, October 2008)
A couple of months ago SF Signal posted a column titled "Young Adult SF/F Books That Adults Will Like, Too" in which a number of writers, editors, and critics discussed the genre of young adult science fiction and fantasy, along with making their recommendations of books which might appeal to adults also. Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link is a title that should be added to that list of recommendations.
Pretty Monsters is Kelly Link's third collection of short stories, the two previous collections being Magic for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen, the latter also released under a Creative Commons License.
Unlike her previous collections, however, Pretty Monsters is being marketed specifically as young adult fiction, which makes it (in more ways than one) a magical pairing. Link's spare but evocative prose complements the intensely-felt inner landscapes of her smart but still emotionally awkward young protagonists. Part of the punch of these stories is that they serve as a reminder to the reader that, when we are young, the most mundane aspects of the world can seem mysterious and even menacing, while the truly weird stuff often seems perfectly mundane.
This sense of topsy-turvyness arises not only from the point of view of Link's teenaged characters, but from the style of her prose, which provides a new slant on the often didactically descriptive prose styles of traditional science fiction and fantasy. Yet such a prose style also recalls other writers who were published in mainstream publications during the 1960s and 1970s, and I often found myself thinking of the short stories of Joan Aiken, who possessed a similar spare but startling prose style.
Link offers stories in a range of genres, from the straightforward fantasy of "The Faerie Handbag" to the science fiction story "The Surfer" and even some dark horror tales, as in the homage to scary summer camp stories, "Monster." Through all the stories, Link's teenaged protagonists remain realistic, even when they are a little bit more than human (another aspect which reminded me of Joan Aiken's short stories).
Yet these stories also possess a wry humor and a subtle sense of literary wit, as evidenced by the first few sentences from the first story in the collection, "The Wrong Grave":
ALL OF THIS happened because a boy I once knew named Miles Sperry decided to go into the resurrectionist business and dig up the grave of his girlfriend, Bethany Baldwin, who had been dead for not quite a year. Miles planned to do this in order to recover the sheaf of poems he had, in what he'd felt was a beautiful and romantic gesture, put into her casket. Or possibly it had just been a really dumb thing to do. He hadn't made copies. Miles had always been impulsive. I think you should know that right up front.
I'm not saying I know a lot of teenagers who have broken into their dead girlfriends' graves, but whether these teenagers are attempting to deal with the humdrum disasters of everyday life -- death, divorce, bad summer camp experiences -- and other events less humdrum -- such as visitation by space aliens -- Link's teenage protagonists behave and speak like actual teenagers; in other words, they are just as smart, funny, romantic, generous, self-involved, and silly as their adult counterparts, making this one more reason why adults as well as young adults should enjoy this collection.
In addition to "The Wrong Grave" and "Monster," the collection includes "Magic for Beginners," in which a teenage boy and his friends follow the adventures of a mysterious television show about a fantastic library and the characters who exist within it; the outstanding science fiction story "The Surfer," about a teenage soccer player in a near-future devastated by pandemics; "The Wizards of Perfil" and "The Constable of Able," two fantasy stories dealing with young girls growing up and finding out that magic doesn't help with most problems and my two favorite stories, "The Specialist's Hat" and "Pretty Monsters," reminiscent of Joan Aiken's supernatural short stories with prose that transforms from delicate whimsy to shivery horror in an instant.
