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Werewolves, corpses, and aliens, oh my!

Kelly Link’s third story collection dazzles

By Melissa Albert
Published: December 9th, 2008 | 12:50pm

In the opening story of Pretty Monsters: Stories, a high school boy quixotically stashes a sheaf of poems into his dead girlfriend’s grave-bound coffin. When he goes back months later to retrieve them, a la Dante Rossetti, the dead girl is ready for a break from the grave. After shedding her feckless ex, she wanders out of the story’s frame and into a new life as a calligrapher or a circus performer. In Link’s world, employment opportunities for the dead are limitless.

This is cult author Kelly Link’s third short story collection, and her first for the young adult market. Link is known for wildly imaginative stories rooted in very human concerns — if you’re a teen werewolf, it just means your curfew is extra strict, and ancient magical objects may turn out to be an unlikely source of high school heartbreak.

Though her books’ population of monsters, aliens, and the walking dead keep them firmly in the fantasy niche, Link’s interpretations of the genre seem limitless; standouts here are the stellar (and terrifying) Gothic tale “The Specialist’s Hat,” mini-bildungsroman “Magic for Beginners,” and the layered, dread-heavy title tale. Whether or not you’re a young adult, the work is no less eerie or sensuous for its audience. The stories play out in an altered American landscape, or in wholly imaginary spaces littered with the detritus of dreams: skinned black dogs and forgotten deities, the gleaming carapace of a dragon.

Essential to the book’s fairytale content is Link’s understanding of the power of objects, the proprietary folk tale feel of something in hand — a carved comb, a clay cup. There’s alchemy in it, and power. Perhaps the thing that most clearly marks this as a young adult book is the agency it gives to teens and children. Sometimes the business of magic is best left up to the young.
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ABOUT THE BOOK
Pretty Monsters
By Kelly Link (Viking Juvenile)
400 pages, $19.99