Kelly Link- Pretty Monsters

The Case Study

Pretty Monsters

By:

Kelly Link

 http://kellylink.net/

http://fictionwritersreview.com/interview/an-interview-with-kelly-link/

 

 

Table of Contents

·       The Wrong Grave pg. 1…………….B

·       The Wizards of Perfil pg. 27……….A+

·       Magic for Beginners pg. 77…………B

·       The Faery Handbag pg.139………….A+

·       The Specialist’s Hat pg.167…………C

·       Monster pg. 187……………………..B+

·       The Surfer pg.213…………………….F

·       The Constable of Abal pg. 279……….C

·       Pretty Monsters pg.323………………F

·       The Cinderella Game pg. 393…………D+

 

 

Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link contains ten short stories (some significantly shorter than others) that are filled with what has been described as “magical realism.” She combines science fiction and fantasy with everyday life situations. The stories don’t all have the same theme or really anything in common besides the clever analogies, metaphors, pithy dialogue and transition from realism to fantasy. I really enjoyed this collection and Link’s style of writing with the exception of two stories that were, for lack of a better word…awful. Although a couple of the stories didn’t do it for me, Link is masterful at creating characters with weird names and crazy quirks.

The Wizards of Perfil

      The Wizards of Perfil is about two cousins named Onion and Halsa who are on the way to a place called Qual. Along the way, Onion’s aunt sells him to Tolcet, the wizards’ secretary, but upon mounting his horse, he decides to buy Halsa instead. When they arrive in Perfil, Halsa is instructed to do certain chores for the wizards, but she never actually sees the wizards. All of the commands come from Tolcet. She is told to take the wizards food, water and anything she found in the marsh that she thought was of any value to them. Halsa becomes frustrated when she would talk to the wizards behind the door of the tower, but there was never any response.

      Even though Onion was left behind with Halsa’s mother, she begins to feel his presence and can eventually hear and see him. He had transferred himself from the train that he was on with his aunt to the wizards’ marsh with Halsa. The cousins continue to do chores for the wizards, assuming that they are just recluses who never leave their towers. At the end of the story, Tolcet reveals that all of the children that he had purchased and brought to the marsh where training to be the new wizards since the king had all of the previous wizards killed.

      This story did at really good job at keeping me interested because I wanted to find out who the wizards where just as much as the characters. It never crossed my mind that the children would actually be these magical little adolescents that would turn into wizards. Links’ writing takes you to this foreign, magical land where you can envision the marsh and imagine what the crumbling towers looked like. She does incredibly well with sensory details and keeping the attention of the reader. This short story was in my top three favorites of this collection.

Magic for Beginners

      Magic for Beginners is about a boy named Jeffrey and his group of eccentric friends who are obsessed with a television program called “The Library.” The show doesn’t have a scheduled time or set schedule, so the group has to rely on chat rooms and social media to figure out when and what channel a new episode is on. The show is about “The Free People’s World-Tree Library” where there are forbidden books and science fiction situations. The characters often switch actors and nobody can ever figure out who the actors are.

      Jeremy’s mother, who is a librarian, finds out that she has inherited a wedding chapel from her aunt in Las Vegas and that Jeremy was left a telephone booth in the middle of the desert. The two plan a road trip to visit the locations, so Jeremy’s friends plan a going away party where they all dress up as characters from their favorite television show where he sneaks away to call his newly inherited phone booth where the characters from “The Library” answer.

      In this story, Link uses some of the best dialogue I have ever read. My personal favorite metaphor was used by the character Jeremy when he refers to himself as a tennis ball being hurled back and forth by his parents. Link writes, “He feels like a tennis ball in a game where the tennis players love him very, very much, even while they lob and smash and send him back and forth, back and forth.” How relatable is that to anyone who has unhappy or divorced parents? I love how she transitioned from realism to fantasy using the randomly inherited telephone booth and a bunch of kids obsessed with a seemingly made up television show.

Pretty Monsters

      Pretty Monsters is obviously how the collection got its name and is responsible for earning Link the LOCUS award for best novella, but it was a total failure for me. The story is written from the perspective of one girl named Clementine, who somehow always ends up having near death experiences and gets rescued by the same guy over and over again and from another girl named Lee, who is kidnapping one of her friends for her inauguration into their all-girls school. Hazing or whatever. The parts about Clementine are interesting enough, but combined these perspectives have absolutely nothing in common with each other and do not mesh together in any way. The story also lacked science fiction or horror aside from the end when Clementine finds her life saver dead in Bucharest. That is literally the only mystery I found in this story. How did the guy and his new wife die? And what did these two narratives have to do with one another? The only thing that came together for me was the reference to girls as “Pretty Monsters.”