Kelly Link has been a slow burn for me. When I first read her, I was misled by the genre elements and underestimated how attentively her stories need to be read. Now I've learned, taught particularly by "Magic for Beginners" and how it seems to show its hand while a whole deeper layer is playing out underneath and becomes apparent only when you really look closely.
In Get in Trouble, there's destabilisation in every story. These stories are unpredictable, and demand that you follow them without knowing where they're going. Often, important aspects of plot, setting or character are introduced early in ways that are deliberately impossible to make sense of without the context that comes from reading on; more than one story found me flipping back to the beginning to work out just what had happened after I came to its end. The trick is often discerning the straightforward (but only straightforward once found) line of events or motivation that is craftily obscured beneath the fantastic detail. There's always an intimation of darkness and the possibility of horror - but the horror is rarely realised, or at least not in the ways that conventional narrative leads us to expect, and never in ways that fail to serve a larger thematic purpose.
"Two Houses" stood out; also "Valley of the Girls" (which I've read before); and, with more ambivalence on my part, "Light".
Reading about Get in Trouble also led me to this interview with Link -
There’s a writer, Howard Waldrop, who says that all writers, no matter when they are setting their story, have a personal timeframe; often childhood or adolescence or a moment in life which was traumatic or emotionally full of wonder, and so, and often when they write they draw on this landscape, those feelings, that moment in time, in order to frame how people interact, even if they’re setting stuff in the future or the past. What you want is for something to feel lived in.
and -
... seeking out the work and genres which are pleasurable to you, and when you’re a writer and you’re drawing from those sources, one of things that entails is thinking closely about what’s drawing you.
Genre’s strength is that the patterns genre depends on are sturdy ones. Because of this, they have great staying power. Also because of this, the patterns are conservative. They tap into symbols and correlations that come out of cultural consensus. When writers organize stories around patterns, especially when there’s a death, or a danger, or a bad person, there will inevitably be a metaphor at work.
