I started reading this quite a while back, but came back to it a few days ago after noticing it on my kindle. I picked a story at random - 'Survivor's Ball, or, The Donner Party' - and it turned out to be just the kind of story I needed to read right then, in the way it built and paid off on an unnerving sense of creepiness and threat, and so I've since gone back and read the entire collection.
Apart from the unifying element of strangeness - manifesting in both what occurs and the (linguistic/tonal) register in which they happen, and are described as happening - the stories in Stranger Things Happen are an uneven bunch.
The good ones are very good: slippery, unstable and menacing, and satisfyingly emotionally grounded (in a 'glimpse of truth' kind of way) without being at all obvious in how they get there; "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose" and "Louise's Ghost" are two that stand out in that latter way in particular. So too do "The Specialist's Hat" and "Vanishing Act", both of which also, without being exactly better, are sharpened somehow to a finer point, "The Specialist's Hat" in its creeping sense of dread and hauntedness (not to mention how it invokes, eludes and partakes in generic horror story-telling expectation, with its two twin girls, mysterious babysitter, and dark things lurking within and outside the house), and "Vanishing Act", which is maybe just a touch more direct (without sacrificing nuance) in how it goes at the plaintive sense of grief and confusion associated with one's parents being absent in whatever sense.
On the other hand, some of the others, I tended to bounce off a bit. I didn't find them interesting or feel there was anything much going on with them. There wasn't any particular pattern to those, except maybe they tended to adhere more closely to a particular fairytale ("Travels with the Snow Queen") or mythological ("Flying Lessons") outline ... but what Link's about is difficult and I don't hold that against her given how good most of these are.
Also - it is glorious how funny she is in patches. Some of the stuff with the ghost that haunts Louise is gold, and the riffing she does about the various state contestants in the beauty pageant in the 'Miss Kansas on Judgment Day' section of 'Shoe and Marriage' is hilarious - the kind of writing that feels so unforced that one imagines it must have come out, more or less, in one smooth continuous flow of joyous inspiration, but actually was almost certainly laboured over and carefully crafted (I say that with admiration) to create that impression.
Apart from the unifying element of strangeness - manifesting in both what occurs and the (linguistic/tonal) register in which they happen, and are described as happening - the stories in Stranger Things Happen are an uneven bunch.
The good ones are very good: slippery, unstable and menacing, and satisfyingly emotionally grounded (in a 'glimpse of truth' kind of way) without being at all obvious in how they get there; "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose" and "Louise's Ghost" are two that stand out in that latter way in particular. So too do "The Specialist's Hat" and "Vanishing Act", both of which also, without being exactly better, are sharpened somehow to a finer point, "The Specialist's Hat" in its creeping sense of dread and hauntedness (not to mention how it invokes, eludes and partakes in generic horror story-telling expectation, with its two twin girls, mysterious babysitter, and dark things lurking within and outside the house), and "Vanishing Act", which is maybe just a touch more direct (without sacrificing nuance) in how it goes at the plaintive sense of grief and confusion associated with one's parents being absent in whatever sense.
On the other hand, some of the others, I tended to bounce off a bit. I didn't find them interesting or feel there was anything much going on with them. There wasn't any particular pattern to those, except maybe they tended to adhere more closely to a particular fairytale ("Travels with the Snow Queen") or mythological ("Flying Lessons") outline ... but what Link's about is difficult and I don't hold that against her given how good most of these are.
Also - it is glorious how funny she is in patches. Some of the stuff with the ghost that haunts Louise is gold, and the riffing she does about the various state contestants in the beauty pageant in the 'Miss Kansas on Judgment Day' section of 'Shoe and Marriage' is hilarious - the kind of writing that feels so unforced that one imagines it must have come out, more or less, in one smooth continuous flow of joyous inspiration, but actually was almost certainly laboured over and carefully crafted (I say that with admiration) to create that impression.
