Kelly Link. Sharona Jacobs
Kelly Link likes zombies. A lot. Her Twitter handle is @haszombiesinit, and her 2006 short story collection Magic for Beginners contains not one but two zombie stories: “The Hortlak” and “Some Zombie Contingency Plans.” But despite this well-publicized love of zombies, Link’s new collection, Get in Trouble , focuses more on a different supernatural predator.
“I wanted to write some more zombie stories, but I just didn’t feel like I had any zombie stories in me at the moment,” Link says in Episode 136 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “But I was really interested in vampires this time around. So there are some vampire stories.”
Link is one of the most admired short story writers working today. Her unconventional narratives place oddball characters in everyday situations that are strangely altered by elements of fantasy and science fiction, creating quirky, dreamlike scenarios that are often deeply unsettling. Even when she tries her best to write something completely realistic, as in her new story “The Lesson,” elements of the fantastic creep in. The same thing happens when she watches television.
“I find that I get bored pretty easy watching television,” she says. “And I realized that if there is not a fantastic or a supernatural element to a story, that I become wistful, and I think, ‘This show would be so much better if one of the characters was a vampire.'”
She finds that pretty much any show—from sitcoms to cooking shows—can be improved by imagining that some or all of the characters are vampires. In fact, she’s made it into a party game to play with friends—watch your favorite TV show and see if you can spot any clues to suggest that some of the characters are secretly vampires.
“Usually there’s at least one,” she says. “And usually everybody can sort of agree that that’s probably the vampire.”
Listen to our complete interview with Kelly Link in Episode 136 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.
Kelly Link on the Monstrous Affections anthology:
“We started really thinking about how strange it was that vampires so often fall for teenage girls, and fall so hard that they’re willing to spend a lot of time in high schools or doing very teenage things, because frankly that sounds terrible to me. Maybe I would make a bad vampire, but my high school experience was not so amazing that I’d want to repeat it a lot. And so Cassie said that she always figured that if you were a vampire, that in fact the group you’d probably want to spend the most time with would be your peers, and how tragic that moment would be when you realize that your peer group—the group who shares a common body of experiences with you—is about to die out. And so she said she was thinking about writing a vampire story set in a nursing home, and that was such a touching, unusual take on the vampire story that we started thinking of other kinds of monster stories. That was really the impetus for that anthology.”
Kelly Link on her story “Valley of the Girls”:
“I started thinking about what it would be like, if things continue the way they are, if the rich keep getting richer and richer and richer, and the kinds of lifestyles their kids would have access to, and also the kind of safeguards that maybe families would put up around those kids to keep them out of the public eye—sort of an inversion of the celebrity culture. So in the story parents hire ‘Faces’ who enact the lives of their kids, so that if they’re being photographed or if they appear on social media, it is in fact these replacement children who have been hired to enact this perfect kid lifestyle. And at the same time maybe the kids would have super-expensive hobbies. … Sometimes the biggest markers of the way that people lived in the past are the really weird, extravagant gestures by people who had a lot of power and wanted to be remembered. And I felt there was a tension between adolescents who are hidden away from the world, but still wanted to make their mark. So maybe the person everybody sees as you isn’t you, but nevertheless you’re going to have a really big-ass pyramid, so that after you’re dead and gone people will still remember you.”
Kelly Link on genre boundaries:
“I think there is a sense in publishing that readers are much more open to stories that are not realistic, and it’s a shift which happens every once in a while. The kinds of realistic, mimetic fiction which were popular for so long, and the stuff which was considered ‘genre’—fantasy, horror, science fiction—those used to be much more intertwined than they were. There was a period when they were much more separate, and now it seems like things are moving back together again, which is great. … I really expected when I was first writing short stories that I would mostly be writing for an audience that was pretty well-versed in genre, and that loved specifically fantasy, science fiction, and horror. I read outside those genres, I read anything I can get my hands on, but I didn’t necessarily expect that the kinds of work that I did would find a larger audience. So it’s been kind of astonishing that these stories reach a larger audience, and god knows there’s a lot of other really great work which mostly reaches a genre readership that I think should reach a much, much wider readership.”
Kelly Link on superheroes:
“I did not start reading comics until I was in college—maybe my last year of high school—by which point I would say that half the time when I went into a comic book store, people in the aisles would say, ‘Excuse me, sir,’ as they went by, even though I had long hair and was wearing a skirt—I think because it did not seem like there were a lot of girls going to comic book stores, at least not in North Carolina. … [My approach] comes out of reading the comics that come out of that generation after Alan Moore and Frank Miller, where you did sort of think about, ‘Well, what about the people who got the powers that aren’t so amazing?’ In the two superhero stories I have, there are the people who go out and do the usual things, and yet I cannot quite commit to writing a story about people who go out there and save the world—in part because so many people have already told that story. So I can set that story on the sidelines of the story that I’m actually writing, but the thing I’m actually interested in is those weird liminal spaces in hotels, and people who make statues of superheroes out of butter. That’s the stuff that when I sit down to write, I think, ‘That would be really fun to put in a story.'”
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