Raves and Reviews

“In Kelly Link's pristine, dreamy stories, elemental forces move beneath the facade of ordinary life like the shadows of vast marine creatures below the surface of the sea. The things that happen in her fiction are strange indeed -- a dead man posts letters to the wife whose name he can't remember from a mailbox planted on the beach of a deserted resort; a woman invites a group of cellists to her apartment to play for the naked male ghost that's been crawling across her floor at night -- but they're also intimately connected to the most universal and vexing of emotions: grief, regret, jealousy, restlessness, anger and, especially, sexual passion. Human beings have used myths and fairy tales to wrestle with these feelings for much, much longer than they've used realist fiction, and in writing about the entanglements and betrayals of contemporary life, Link helps herself freely from those warehouses of stories.” – Salon

“Sinister. Dreamy. Supernatural. Link's stories dazzle even as they unsettle. It's hard to imagine anything stranger than a multi-legged beauty contestant, a noseless, nimble-fingered father with a collection of metal and wood prosthetics or a deceased man mailing letters to his widow from a netherworld bordered by a nappy ocean with teeth. And that's for starters. The bizarre atmospherics within these stories are driven as much by what is left unexplained, as in The Specialist's Hat, where two identical 10-year-olds move to a dark mausoleum of a house with their father after their mother's death. The first sentence spotlights the Samantha twin while she speculates that ''when you're Dead, you don't have to brush your teeth.'' The Claire twin chimes in with ''when you're Dead, you live in a box, and it's always dark, but you're not ever afraid.'' In this fashion, the twins' fates are foreshadowed but never quite delineated, as their transformation, of sorts, takes place off the page. Link blends myths, ghosts and alien landscapes with a healthy ladle of modern life for stories that at first confound but eventually order themselves into a titillating weirdness.” – The Miami Herald

“Link offers strange and tantalizing stories -- contemporary fiction with a fairy-tale ambience -- that explore the relationship between loss and death and the many ways we try to cope with both. She boldly weaves myth and fairy tale into contemporary life, drawing inspiration from the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, from the fairy tale of Cinderella, from the writings of C. S. Lewis, and from the true story of the Donner party's descent into cannibalism. Meet Humphrey, one of Zeus' many illegitimate sons, and June, his girlfriend, who decides to travel to Hades to bring Humphrey back. Learn the rules of being dead, and find out what really happened between Kay and the Snow Queen. Ask yourself what would have happened to the prince if he had never found the girl whose foot fit the glass slipper. Link uses the nonsensical to illuminate truth, blurring the distinctions between the mundane and the fantastic to tease out the underlying meanings of modern life.” – Booklist

“Eleven stories showcase a dexterous use of language and a startling, if frequently elusive, imagination as ghosts, aliens, and the living dead invade the most mundane aspects of everyday life. Newcomer Link references fairy tales, mythology, and bits of our common contemporary cultural experience, not to offer commentary but to take off on her own original riffs. So in "Shoe and Marriage" we meet a dictator's widow, unavoidably reminiscent of Imelda Marcos, living in a museum that displays the shoes she took from her husband's murder victims. The story, which also describes a bizarre beauty pageant, plays verbally with shoe metaphors from Cinderella's slippers to Dorothy's ruby reds, but what touches you is not the author's verbal acrobatics but the widow's deep sense of sorrow and horror. Like many of the pieces here, "Shoe and Marriage" joins disparate parts that don't always fit together, but linear connections are not the aim. When she depends too much on pure cleverness, Link ends up sounding derivative and brittle. "Survivor's Ball, or The Donner Party," in which two travelers come to an inn where a creepy if lavish shindig is in full swing, reminds you too insistently of Poe. "Flying Lessons," about a girl's love for a boy whose desire to fly ends tragically (hint, hint), and "Travels With the Snow Queen," in which the fairy tale is revamped to read cute, come across as writing-school literary. But at her best, Link produces oddly moving imagery. In "Louise's Ghost," two friends named Louise have overlapping affairs. The shared name at first seems like another joke, but the tale gradually digs deep into the emotionally charged waters of loss and redemption. Stylistic pyrotechnics light up a bizarre but emotionally truthful landscape. Link's a writer to watch.” – Kirkus Reviews

“[H]er writing belongs in the same camp as Jonathan Carroll's: spooky, indeterminate, a kind of exemplar of literary Heisenbergism. The more you push on any one dimension of her eerie, funny tales, seeking to know the unknowables she deftly sketches, the less you know about other slippery aspects of the text. Link is a fantasist in the grand tradition of Carol Emshwiller, John Crowley, and Robert Coover, blurring the lines between dreams, myths, and reality in exciting new ways. All this talent is on display in Stranger Things Happen, an astonishingly good collection -- which gathers her World Fantasy Award winner "The SpecialistⳠ Hat," plus two stories new to the world, as well as eight others -- into an assemblage of awesome proportions. From its campy retro Nancy Drew-style cover to its closing credits, this is a postmodern fairy-tale landmark.” – Asimov’s

“Stranger Things Happen […] by Kelly Link is a delightful collection of short stories set in a familiar-seeming world.These stories have a dreamy quality, and like traditional fairy tales, Link's often end with a Grimm little twist. "Shoe and Marriage" borrows more than a bit from the story of Cinderella, and "Travels With the Snow Queen" and "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose" play on fairy-tale titles and content. There is also a recurring character, the Girl Detective, who is a lot like a twentysomething Nancy Drew. Link's stories include lots of fairy-tale staples like ghosts, stepmothers and talking ravens. Still, her characters' fears more often involve parents, careers, relationships and being left than things that make noises in the night. We are still afraid of poisoned needles, strangers who offer candy to children, and what a mirror might say when we look into it. But the things that haunt Link's characters are more subtle; they are the kinds of things that really do keep people awake at night and leave them hungry for a comforting word. And no matter how odd the events in her stories may seem, as this book's title says, stranger things happen.” – The Cleveland Plain Dealer