The first thing to say about Vampires in the Lemon Grove, a collection of imaginatively fabulistic short stories, is that it interests me - the stories themselves and in particular Russell's writing, which is cleanly modern (in the sense of being contemporary) and at the same time enlivened by a distinctive personality...she's an excellent user of language and prose, adept with meaning and effect.
The high concepts of the stories are uniformly interesting - reformed vampires take refuge in an Italian lemon grove whose fruits partly assuage their thirst for blood, the female workers in a Meiji era factory gradually transform into human-silkworm hybrids with coloured silk bursting from their bodies when immersed in hot water, dead US presidents find themselves reincarnated in the bodies of horses in a barn somewhere in rural America, settlers share a single glass window amongst themselves in vain hope of becoming landowners in their own right while eking out a hardscrabble existence on an unforgiving plain (this last arguably the only out and out horror story in the set and certainly the one that most unsettled me). I didn't find them wholly satisfying - there's something just a bit elusive about them, a bit of a will o the wisp quality that left me feeling like I hadn't entirely grasped them - but, nonetheless, intriguing.
The high concepts of the stories are uniformly interesting - reformed vampires take refuge in an Italian lemon grove whose fruits partly assuage their thirst for blood, the female workers in a Meiji era factory gradually transform into human-silkworm hybrids with coloured silk bursting from their bodies when immersed in hot water, dead US presidents find themselves reincarnated in the bodies of horses in a barn somewhere in rural America, settlers share a single glass window amongst themselves in vain hope of becoming landowners in their own right while eking out a hardscrabble existence on an unforgiving plain (this last arguably the only out and out horror story in the set and certainly the one that most unsettled me). I didn't find them wholly satisfying - there's something just a bit elusive about them, a bit of a will o the wisp quality that left me feeling like I hadn't entirely grasped them - but, nonetheless, intriguing.
