PRETTY MONSTERS, by Kelly Link

So far 2011 has been a good year for reading. Better than average. I've been reading more than average, and the quality of the books has turned out to be fairly high.

Keeping this blog updated is a little bit of a challenge. It used to be a straightforward business – I'd languish at my NHS desk, fitfully perform my job, & then sneak back to tinker on my next entry. 5 minutes here, 5 minutes there. The gaps in blog work were useful, I'd have an insight into how to express something, or an idea for some kind of HILARIOUS WITTICISM with which to astound you all.

For the past month and a half I've been working from home, trying to get a lot of things accomplished – too many things - & the way it happens is when you try to accomplish too many things, you don't accomplish too many things.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying: here's an entry for something I read 6-7 weeks ago.

Kelly Link is the sort of writer that other writers love. This is not a theory. This is a fact borne out by the spasms of praise on the cover of this, her latest book.

Alice Sebold says: “Intoxicating. These stories will come alive, put on zoot suits and wrestle you to the ground. They want you and you will be theirs.”

Michael Chabon says: “A new short story collection by Kelly Link... and once more, for a little while, the world is worth saving.”

Neil Gaiman says: “Funny, moving, tender, brave and dangerous. She is unique, and should be declared a national treasure, and possibly surrounded at all times by a cordon or armed marines.”

Oh Neil Gaiman you are so funny & charming. You really are a good writer aren't you.


But also sort of like a rock star, with your cool hair & leather jacket.


Not like a bad rock star – not the sort of rock star that does drugs & gets drunk & treats girls mean. You're a rock star the way they should be. The sort you can bring home to your parents, like that nice Chris Martin.



I love you Neil Gaiman.

I digress. What was I talking about? Oh yeah – Kelly Link. Writers love Kelly Link.

& this is not a comprehensive list of the praise on the cover. It is more like a core sample. There are journalists quoted, who clearly love Kelly just as much, but have difficulty expressing their love in witty & original ways, either because they lack the ability of special & talented writers like Neil Gaiman, or else maybe because their editors won't allow it. One thing is clear, however: a considerable portion of the publishing industry is sprawled out on cushions & writhing in a mandala pattern, a churning psychedelic orgy, around the (perhaps slightly embarrassed) form of Ms Link.


I first read Kelly Link about, er... I guess it was 6 years ago. They had a copy of her debut collection Stranger Things Happen at the Wellington Public Library. I pulled the book off the shelf because of its title, stared at it for a moment because it had an interesting cover, & ended up checking it out because it had a glowing review from Peter Straub on the back.

Back then it was just Peter Straub writhing on the cushions. Just him on his own.

I was impressed with Stranger Things Happen. I thought to myself: this is the sort of collection I'd like to put out some day. The stories were weird, not just because of their plots (which were weird), but because some were fragmentary, others were linked, there was a tendency to directly address the reader, to assume they knew things which they didn't, etc. The book felt like a whole, it was satisfying in a way that short fiction collections normally aren't. Like she'd written the stories separately, but always with the idea in mind of the book that would hold them all together.

I dunno. Maybe I'm going overboard here, I'm not sure. I have trouble remembering the specifics of that book. It very quickly dropped out of my mind & for a while I'd forgotten I'd even read it – not because it was bad, or bland, but because much of it had the unfocused & meandering nature of a dream. All I remembered for sure was that there were a few stories about a character called “the Girl Detective”, which I liked, & a story called “the Specialist's Hat” which I found baffling & scary.

Maybe Stanger Things Happen is a more normal book than I remember. At any rate Pretty Monsters is a more normal book than I remember Stranger Things Happening being.


The plots are still weird. Well... yes, they're definitely weird, but by the time you come to the end of this book a definite formula has emerged. In keeping with my “no spoilers” policy, I will keep my description of this formula as abstract as possible.

There is an alienated child or adolescent, aged 8-16. They are an only child, or a twin. They are missing one of their parents (often the father - where they have a father, he is aloof & emotionally incompetent).

The status quo is kooky & eccentric. Boy-girl relationships are especially kooky, & complicated. The reader is quietly surprised by many things. Then weird things begin to happen, even by the child's standards. These weird things often happen just below the surface of reality. There is an implicit sense of doom. A variety of strange characters interact with the child, some friendly, some bizarrely hostile (but, we eventually learn, friendly in their way).

The sense of implicit doom is ramped up – doom, doom. Then many surprising things happen at once. 1-2 characters reveal true identities that have a surprising relationship to the child. The anticipated doom either doesn't occur, or is revealed to be basically OK. The ending is ambiguous & confusing. We are confronted by an unanswered question, which initially didn't seem important.

This template can be applied, with almost universal success, to maybe 8 of the 10 stories in this book. Which in a sense is a shame. It's a shame because I don't think Stranger Things Happen was this formulaic. Like I say, I'm not too sure, it's been a while since I read it.

It's also a shame, generally, when things are formulaic. Isn't it? I don't know. & particularly when it happens in weird fiction – which I like to think of as enjoying a lot of freedom, but which is in practise often very formulaic. I suppose one could argue the irrationality of the events in the story need to be counterbalanced by a rationalising plot structure, or all hell would break loose (or the story would just be random & unconvincing).

The plus side of Link's formula is that it gives her a lot of room for being inventive, & if you like what you've read after the first 2-3 stories you start looking forward to it, because you know you have another 300 pages of the same. & it's an emotionally satisfying formula, for all those reasons people like to read funny, cynical, dark fantasy stories about alienated kids.

The alienated kid is you, because you were alienated when you were a kid.
The kookiness reminds you that when you were young life was full of wonder & possibilities.
But the missing parent reminds you it wasn't all fun & games.
The weird encounters with strange & sometimes hostile people reflect your experiences of growing up.
You remember the sense of doom – the sense that the bubble you lived in was going to burst. I guess turning into an adult felt like a death sentence. Or else maybe you felt that the more control or responsibility you were being given, the more things seemed to be going wrong
Eventually you got through it, & it wasn't so bad after all.
The things you were worried about turned out to be not so important.
But other things you'd ignored were suddenly coming to the fore.

It's a cosy formula. You get to the end, you have a mini nostalgia-catharsis, then you turn the page and start over again. Like going down a slide, climbing back up, going down it again.

Link has a very immersive, but aloof/alienated writing style. Something surprising happens every page. The prose is wilfully surprising – it is doing it's best to be unusual (unusually perceptive about the unusual traits of its unusual characters) on a moment to moment basis. You can get tired of it, or you can get sort of hooked & fall straight into it. Most of the stories in this book are around 60 pages long, which is just the right length to sit in a laundrette, or drink 2 pints in a bar after work, & read one of them.

& it genuinely is a shame when the book is over & you don't have any more of them to read.

I don't know if I'd call this book horror. Basically Link is weird, but cosy-weird. Like Neil. Or actually, the much better comparison is with Shaun Tan, who actually provides illustrations for this collection. You feel like Kelly Link & Shaun Tan would probably get along very well, if they were having coffee together. Maybe they have done just that. MAYBE THEY ARE HAVING AN AFFAIR.

Oh my God. What is it with these people!?


Now having said all that, I would like finally to discuss a couple of the stories in here.

This is not a 100% new/original collection. Some stories are reprinted from earlier books – in fact the theme here seems to be “let's collect her career in a large mass market compendium & properly introduce her to the public”. “The Specialist's Hat” has made the jump over from Stranger Things Happen.

“The Specialist's Hat” is, quite apart from everything I've said here, although the formula does sort of apply, a really magnificent piece of weird/horror fiction. It's so full of creepy details & creepy moments, & it scatters them around in a “connect the dots” way. The hat itself, & the scene with the bicycle, is one of the most weirdly frightening things I've read (or re-read) in a long time. There's no telling exactly what's going on here, but as a refreshing breath of fresh air things are NOT all OK at the end of the story. The sense of doom is still pounding away, even if it gets mitigated by a very chilling sort of optimism by the end. I really like this story.

Of the others, “Monster” fits the formula exactly, but is cool & creepy & hilarious. Also the final & most recent story, “The Cinderella Game” is very, very cool – it plays around in similar territory to the other stories, but it feels whole, it has its own atmosphere separate from the nostalgia-catharsis. It's sort of nastier. Maybe that's what the other stories needed, a dose of something less...

...smooshy.

GOOD? Yeah. These stories are so inventive & well written & charming it would be churlish to come down hard against them. I was a little disappointed at first at how conventional the collection turned out to be, but I had a great time reading this.

FILE UNDER: The weird horror-ish collection that you can safely lend to your niece, or to your mother.

WOULD GO WELL WITH: Tales from Outer Suburbia, by Shaun Tan. They'd go very well together. But hey I was just joking about these guys having an affair, I have absolutely no evidence to support this. I mean they probably met when collaborating on Pretty Monsters, maybe he flew over to where she lives, or she flew over to him, & maybe there was a night in there where, after checking over the proofs or whatever they were at a loose end for what to do, & they maybe had a couple of drinks together in the hotel bar. But that's normal. People do that sort of thing all the time, it doesn't mean anything.

WHO SHOT JFK? (POCKET ESSENTIALS), by Robin Ramsey

Just a short review for this one, it’s a short book, & if I write long reviews for everything then this blog will eat my life – it will EAT MY LIFE, man.



This book is terrific. Seriously, it’s a little gem.

It’s terrific because it’s less than 100 pages long, OK well the pages are densely spaced and font is small, but it’s physically quite a small object, and the Kennedy assassination is a huge, H-U-G-E subject, and Robin Ramsey somehow manages to condense everything into this short summary, such that if you aren’t one of those people who want to spend the rest of their lives reading about this, this is all you need to read. So mission accomplished.

Robin Ramsey is the guy who edits Lobster magazine, in case you were wondering.

Anyway. JFK getting shot is a fascinating subject. I mean think about it, the most politically important man in the world gets gunned down in public and the actual killer is never found. Most people believe a conspiracy exists, but the conspiracy itself has never come to light.



& there are some pretty weird aspects to the case. Medical reports suggest TWO different bodies underwent autopsy as “JFK” (the 2nd one is probably the Dallas cop allegedly killed by Oswald). Eyewitness reports and biographical details suggest there were TWO people acting the role of “Lee Harvey Oswald” in the years running up to the murder. There’s no way he could have been in Japan AND New Orleans at the same time. It’s like some crazy doppelganger story.

Two “killers”, two “victims”… seven brides for “Sven’s brothers”!?? ?!

Meanwhile Jack Ruby was a mafia gangster and possibly Oswald’s ex-lover. The whole New Orleans angle – Clay Shaw, etc – is a gay thing. What about the “three vagrants” – some people reckon one of them was E Howard Hunt!



& do you realise that E Howard Hunt wrote spy novels in the 40s – and received a Guggenheim Fellowship grant!?! & what’s with Mexico City!?! & what kind of name is “Loy Factor”!?
???!!??!



Seriously who names their kid “Loy”.

Ramsey is very up-front about his take on the assassination. He states his suspicions in the book’s opening paragraph, & makes a compelling case throughout the book, but not at the expense of other people’s theories.

But this blog isn't about spoilers, so instead of revealing the identity of the mastermind behind the assassination, here are some random photos of nothing much.

ELLA MINNOW PEA, by Mark Dunn

You get these things, I think of them as “trick novels”, where everything is based around a clever premise. The story is moving backwards, or the reader is the protagonist, or it’s a novel about writing the novel that is the novel, or whatever. I don’t have anything against these books, per se (I was planning to write one for a while there), I just don’t read them.

So it’s thanks to the White Queen that I ended up reading one last week – around four months after she lent it to me.



Ella Minnow Pea takes place on an island where language is of paramount importance, it’s almost a religion. They have a statue in the town square commemorating one of their citizens, a guy named Nevin Nollop who came up with the pangram “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. There is no telephone system on the island, so everyone communicates via letters, & everyone writes with the corny, zesty vocabulary of a cartoon professor from a kid’s TV show. Anyway the letter tiles start falling off the memorial, and each time they do the Elders decide this means Nollop is speaking from beyond the grave, telling them to stop using that particular letter. So the letter becomes illegal, its use is strictly punished by the town’s fascist police force (they have a fascist police force, despite being a nation of cartoon professor characters), & as the story is told in letters (that’s letters as in missives) the novel stops incorporating the prohibited letters (as in graphemes) in its text. So first you’re getting a novel without “Z”, then “Q” goes, then “V”, etc., etc. Life becomes very hard for people on the island, various rebellions are formed & subsequently crushed, & it eventually becomes clear that the only way to restore order is for someone to formulate a shorter pangram than “the quick brown fox etc etc”, to dispel the prevailing notion that Nollop is some kind of deity. But there’s a deadline, arbitrarily, & so it’s a race against time.

This maybe sounds a little contrived. Like the author decided to write a novel with a diminishing selection of letters, & came up with the plot just to suit the form. & it is like that. It is exactly like that. That, I would venture, is what happened here. Characters have certain names, bizarre habits & occupations which at first seem like eccentric little quirks, but inevitably turn out to have been reverse engineered so they can be discussed without certain letters. For instance the main character is named Ella Minnow Pea. Hmm.

Suspension of disbelief is an issue here. But the second half of the novel – against all odds, since as I say it reads a bit like a zany kid’s educational programme – shifts into a sort of dark, paranoid, dystopian vibe. Characters get lashed, pilloried, exiled. A kindly old professor gets shot in the head evading arrest. A woman goes mad & kills herself in quite a strange way. Etc* & it’s all being told with a diminishing alphabet – this turns out to be a very effective technique for representing totalitarian control. The letter-writers at first tiptoe around the missing letters, then later run into serious problems expressing themselves, finally degenerating into crude phonetics, angry or tragic or hopeful messages written in a sort of grunt-language. It’s kind of... moving to see these people struggling to remain themselves and to connect with each other, with the heavy burden that’s been placed on their communications.

& so, strangely, this one turned out to be quite a good book. It’s nothing earth shattering, but it is quite short, & would take most people less than 3-4 hours to read. It’s a rewarding way to spend less than 3-4 hours of your time.



* The shift from "G" rated cutsiness into "PG-13" brutality is a little jarring. I'm not entirely clear on whether Mark Dunn is doing this deliberately - i.e. making the contrast as sharp as possible to illustrate the evils of fascism - or whether he just got carried away. In any event, it's weird & kind of icky, like watching a smurf getting its nose broken. Because of the linguistic constraints the novel places on itself, it's actually quite hard to get a sense of "Mark Dunn the Novelist". We get "Mark Dunn the Wordsmith" instead.

Side note: I often find that my mind half-adapts itself to the reality of whatever book I’m reading (I think the worst case of this syndrome I ever had was when reading The Dancers at the End of Time – I experienced something like a drug come down every time I stopped reading – it seriously bugged me that I wasn’t hooked up to enormous engines which were gratifying my every wish).

Reading Ella Minnow Pea sort of messes with your head, because you’re trying to keep track of what letters are permissible, what things can and cannot be said (characters slip up at times and are arrested for the content of their letters), & then when you put the book down and try writing an email, or ordering a drink from a bar, you find yourself unconsciously tiptoeing around certain letters, words & phrases. Or else you do the reverse & start mentally formulating pangrams. If nothing else, this book will make you temporarily very aware of the language you use.