We do not even know the question that starts the story, though we can guess: Link immediately sets the reader on unsure footing. “Stone Animals” is brimming with Gothic terror and uncanny unease. There are dinner parties, late work hours, and unending paint options for the walls. Henry still has to commute to the city to work, and Catherine is left at home to fix up the house while Carleton and Tilly run wild. Ostensibly, “Stone Animals” follows a husband, a pregnant wife, and their two children as they settle into a new house in the suburbs.
It’s a ghost story without any ghosts, domestic realism in which the domestic is unreal. Like most of her stories, “Stone Animals” is hard to classify yet impossible to forget. However, the story I’m recommending comes from her second collection, Magic for Beginners.
You should, of course, buy it and devour. This week sees the release of Get in Trouble, Link’s first adult book in nearly a decade (she published a YA story collection, Pretty Monsters, in 2008). And she’s been doing it since before it was cool.
This genre-mixing is increasingly popular in the literary world but few, if any, writers are able to mix these elements into fiction as startlingly original as the stories of Kelly Link. Since her debut collection in 2001, Link has blurred genre boundaries, mixed YA and adult literary fiction, and published stories about zombies and witches in mainstream literary magazines.
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