Kelly Link’s latest collection of short stories riffs wildly on traditional fairy tales, filleting out their morphological structures and transposing them. She ranges from a space-set ‘Hansel and Gretel’ to a same-sex version of ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’, and much more besides. Like Angela Carter, Link understands the psychological (and narratological) powers of her raw material, and makes thrilling shapes while also dissecting modern society, our fears and our fantasies.
Each of these scintillating stories (not a dud among them) concerns lost characters in search of truth about themselves or the world. Sometimes they find it; more often they don’t. Link’s lucid prose moves the reader unerringly onwards through the forested thickets of her imagination. In ‘The White Cat’s Divorce’ (based on ‘The White Cat’, a version of the ‘Animal Bride’ trope) an ageing bazillionaire finds his three growing sons an affront to his mortality, so he sends them off on impossible missions.
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