Reviewed by Gwenda Bond

Kelly Link’s work earns frequent comparisons to that of writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Franz Kafka, Italo Calvino and Angela Carter. Like those writers, her stories often explore the nature of reality and its relationship to the nature of story. What sets Link apart is that much of her work reads as an argument that stories are as real as anything else. The worlds created in Kelly Link’s fiction are often composed of stories as much as more corporeal elements. The shock of reading a Link story is not in experiencing the real on equal footing with the fantastic, or the fantastic as the real, but in experiencing real life on the terms of story.

For years, Link has constructed many of these memorable worlds made of story around teen or child characters. Nine of those stories are pulled together in her new collection aimed at the young adult audience, Pretty Monsters, featuring illustrations by Shaun Tan. Just as Link’s early stories pressed against the boundaries of speculative fiction, enlarging it in the process, so these stories expand the borders of young adult fiction.

A sense of immediacy is frequently cited as a defining characteristic of young adult fiction. This often manifests as a preference for first-person narrators locked in the moment of the story they happen to be telling. By contrast, Link’s collection contains only two stories with first-person narrators, “The Faery Handbag” and “The Surfer.” The other stories are told by a series of sly, knowing omniscient narrators, who bring a sense of perspective and distance with them. Yet far from landing these stories outside the realm of YA, these narrators serve to lend the same strangely heightened sense of reality so closely associated with teendom.

One of the elements that gives teen life and teen literature its power is the great unknown–what happens next is truly in flux. Link’s stories sometimes directly draw on this parallel, as in the title story, “Pretty Monsters,” original to the collection. The narrative opens as young Clementine Cleary walks into the ocean during a waking dream. Clementine is saved from drowning by teenager Cabell Meadows, with whom she immediately falls in love. The story’s other dominant thread involves teen Czigany Khulhat and her younger sister Parci being put through an “ordeal,” or initiation ritual, by Czigany’s friends, and derives tension from the question of whether the Khulhats may be keeping a sinister or supernatural secret. Clementine’s storyline feels painfully real, as she surfs Livejournal and humiliates herself for her crush. Meanwhile, Czigany’s friends take her to an anarchist aunt’s farm on the remains of an abandoned amusement park. Just when Link gives us clues as to which is the “real” story after all, she introduces yet another one. “Stories shift their shape,” according to the narrator. And if story is endlessly malleable, so is life.

The motifs of stories within stories, of storyteller in conversation with the audience, of what is reality and what truth, occur throughout the collection. “Pretty Monsters” is clearly in dialogue with “Magic for Beginners,” with its Buffy-like television show “The Library,” which may also contain the story’s characters. Or take “The Wrong Grave,” with its girl mistakenly resurrected by a young poet seeking to retrieve poetry he let be buried with his girlfriend. The concealed first-person narrator spins possibilities for where the dead girl goes after the story, playfully making the point that they may all be true or all false. While “The Wizards of Perfil” and “The Constable of Abal” echo traditional high fantasy narratives, they quickly transform into something else. “Monster” combines the familiar brew of boys at camp, bullying, and tales of a monster in the woods into an air of unsettling creepiness.

Adult fans of Link’s work may be familiar with some of these stories, such as “The Specialist’s Hat” and “Magic for Beginners,” but several first appeared in anthologies for younger readers and will likely be new. Younger readers coming to Link’s work for the first time will find worlds that manage to seem as familiar as they do strange, where watching “Survivor” and playing Scrabble are as normal as girls who become werewolves, pandemics, people who believe in aliens, and writing haikus for the Weather Channel. Sounds about like being an average teenager these days, doesn’t it?