Since her debut collection in 2001, Link has blurred genre boundaries, mixed YA and adult literary fiction, and published stories about zombies and witches in mainstream literary magazines. This genre-mixing is increasingly popular in the literary world but few, if any, writers are able to mix these elements into fiction as startlingly original as the stories of Kelly Link. And she’s been doing it since before it
was cool.
This week sees the release of Get in Trouble, Link’s first adult book in nearly a decade (she published a YA story collection, Pretty Monsters, in 2008). You should, of course, buy it and devour. However, the story I’m recommending comes from her second collection, Magic for Beginners. Like most of her stories, “Stone Animals” is hard to classify yet impossible to forget. It’s a ghost story without any ghosts, domestic realism in which the domestic is unreal.
Ostensibly, “Stone Animals” follows a husband, a pregnant wife, and their two children as they settle into a new house in the suburbs. Henry still has to commute to the city to work, and Catherine is left at home to fix up the house while Carleton and Tilly run wild. There are dinner parties, late work hours, and unending paint options for the walls. There are no murders or monsters. Nothing explicitly horrifying happens.
And yet.
“Stone Animals” is brimming with Gothic terror and uncanny unease. Link immediately sets the reader on unsure footing. We do not even know the question that starts the story, though we can guess:
Henry asked a question. He was joking.
“As a matter of fact,” the real estate agent snapped, “it is.”
As the family explores their new life, Link’s writing recalls the films of David Lynch in its ability to imbue everyday objects with terror. If the house is haunted, the haunting is not found in grand, Gothic architecture or secret chambers. The haunting is in the banal objects of everyday life. The TV, the car, even bars of soap. It’s an American dream turned dark and strange: Kafka in Cheever’s clothing.
What entities are haunting or what this haunting entails, is, like so much else, unclear.
Reality itself is unstable. Dreams blur into waking life. Objects become other objects. Are the titular stone animals dogs or lions or rabbits? The family is unsure. Drawings of trees turn into rabbits, and in dreams the rabbits become skyscrapers. Even the boss’s rubber band ball looks “like some kind of eyeless, hairless, legless animal. Maybe a dog. A Carleton-sized dog…”
“Stone Animals” is thick with meaning—psychoanalytically inclined readers can have a field day—yet resistant to simple interpretation. The story transforms as you look at it, in the same way that Link’s fiction expertly moves between genres and resists simple forms.
Is the house haunted? Is Tilly becoming a rabbit? Is Henry going to war with the neighbors? The reader is left with many questions and only one answer: Kelly Link is magic.
“As a matter of fact,” the real estate agent snapped, “it is.”
It was not a question she had expected to be asked. She gave Henry a goofy, appeasing smile and yanked at the hem of the skirt of her pink linen suit, which seemed as if it might, at any moment, go rolling up her knees like a window shade. She was younger than Henry, and sold houses that she couldn’t afford to buy.
“It’s reflected in the asking price, of course,” she said. “Like you said.”
Henry stared at her. She blushed.
“I’ve never seen anything,” she said. “But there are stories. Not stories that I know. I just know there are stories. If you believe that sort of thing.”
“I don’t,” Henry said. When he looked over to see if Catherine had heard, she had her head up the tiled fireplace, as if she were trying it on, to see whether it fit. Catherine was six months pregnant. Nothing fit her except for Henry’s baseball caps, his sweatpants, his T-shirts. But she liked the fireplace.
Carleton was running up and down the staircase, slapping his heels down hard, keeping his head down and his hands folded around the banister. Carleton was serious about how he played. Tilly sat on the landing, reading a book, legs poking out through the railings. Whenever Carleton ran past, he thumped her on the head, but Tilly never said a word. Carleton would be sorry later, and never even know why.
Catherine took her head out of the fireplace. “Guys,” she said. “Carleton, Tilly. Slow down a minute and tell me what you think. Think King Spanky will be okay out here?”
“King Spanky is a cat, Mom,” Tilly said. “Maybe we should get a dog, you know, to help protect us.” She could tell by looking at her mother that they were going to move. She didn’t know how she felt about this, except she had plans for the yard. A yard like that needed a dog.
“I don’t like big dogs,” said Carleton, six years old and small for his age. “I don’t like this staircase. It’s too big.”
“Carleton,” Henry said. “Come here. I need a hug.”
Carleton came down the stairs. He lay down on his stomach on the floor and rolled, noisily, floppily, slowly, over to where Henry stood with the real estate agent. He curled like a dead snake around Henry’s ankles. “I don’t like those dogs outside,” he said.
“I know it looks like we’re out in the middle of nothing, but if you go down through the backyard, cut through that stand of trees, there’s this little path. It takes you straight down to the train station. Ten-minute bike ride,” the agent said. Nobody ever remembered her name, which was why she had to wear too-tight skirts. She was, as it happened, writing a romance novel, and she spent a lot of time making up pseudonyms, just in case she ever finished it. Ophelia Pink. Matilde Hightower. LaLa Treeble. Or maybe she’d write gothics. Ghost stories. But not about people like these. “Another ten minutes on that path and you’re in town.”
“What dogs, Carleton?” Henry said.
“I think they’re lions, Carleton,” said Catherine. “You mean the stone ones beside the door? Just like the lions at the library. You love those lions, Carleton. Patience and Fortitude?”
“I’ve always thought they were rabbits,” the real estate agent said. “You know, because of the ears. They have big ears.” She flopped her hands and then tugged at her skirt, which would not stay down. “I think they’re pretty valuable. The guy who built the house had a gallery in New York. He knew a lot of sculptors.”
Henry was struck by that. He didn’t think he knew a single sculptor.
“I don’t like the rabbits,” Carleton said. “I don’t like the staircase. I don’t like this room. It’s too big. I don’t like her.”
“Carleton,” Henry said. He smiled at the real estate agent.
“I don’t like the house,” Carleton said, clinging to Henry’s ankles. “I don’t like houses. I don’t want to live in a house.”
“Then we’ll build you a teepee out on the lawn,” Catherine said. She sat on the stairs beside Tilly, who shifted her weight, almost imperceptibly, towards Catherine. Catherine sat as still as possible. Tilly was in fourth grade and difficult in a way that girls weren’t supposed to be. Mostly she refused to be cuddled or babied. But she sat there, leaning on Catherine’s arm, emanating saintly fragrances: peacefulness, placidness, goodness. I want this house, Catherine said, moving her lips like a silent movie heroine, to Henry, so that neither Carleton nor the agent, who had bent over to inspect a piece of dust on the floor, could see. “You can live in your teepee, and we’ll invite you to come over for lunch. You like lunch, don’t you? Peanut butter sandwiches?”
