![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Stranger Things Happen is a short story collection, an odd mix of ghost stories (including one, "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose," from the viewpoint of the ghost), fairy tales, and sheer surrealism. The stories are good enough that I read slowly: pausing after each to absorb it before going on to the next. I'm less likely to do this if the stories are either closely connected—say, a series of shorts about the same characters—or only very loosely so, as in a best of the year anthology.
The second piece of "Shoe and Marriage", about the honeymooners and the beauty contest contestants, had me laughing out loud for entire paragraphs, leading from gentle descriptions of what the narrator(s) learn from listening to the television interviews, that one is dyslexic and another makes her own clothes, to Miss New Jersey's tail, and "Miss Texas is a professional hit woman. She performs exorcisms on the side. She says she is keeping her eye on Miss New Jersey." Unfortunately, a printing error cost me one page of this story: at least in my copy, page 118 is repeated where 188 should be, at the end of the section about the dictator's wife.
"Flying Lessons" lurks at the edge of Greek myths, and at a cheap hotel in Scotland. "Travels with the Snow Queen" describes a woman traveling, in ways magical and often painful, on the trail of her onetime lover, but not to rescue him or get him to resume the relationship. "The Girl Detective" has the narrator describing, or maybe talking around, the title character: part of the point of the Girl Detective is her ability to change shape, both master of disguise and a bit of everyone's dream. It's told in lots of short bits; there are no ghosts in this one, but tales of alligators in the sewers, lots of lost homework, and a live woman who claims to be Amelia Earhart.
(I borrowed this, and Magic for Beginners, from the library because Link is one of the guests of honor at the upcoming Wiscon. Similar curiosity, years ago, about the GoH at a con I had already decided to attend started me reading Pat Cadigan.)
The second piece of "Shoe and Marriage", about the honeymooners and the beauty contest contestants, had me laughing out loud for entire paragraphs, leading from gentle descriptions of what the narrator(s) learn from listening to the television interviews, that one is dyslexic and another makes her own clothes, to Miss New Jersey's tail, and "Miss Texas is a professional hit woman. She performs exorcisms on the side. She says she is keeping her eye on Miss New Jersey." Unfortunately, a printing error cost me one page of this story: at least in my copy, page 118 is repeated where 188 should be, at the end of the section about the dictator's wife.
"Flying Lessons" lurks at the edge of Greek myths, and at a cheap hotel in Scotland. "Travels with the Snow Queen" describes a woman traveling, in ways magical and often painful, on the trail of her onetime lover, but not to rescue him or get him to resume the relationship. "The Girl Detective" has the narrator describing, or maybe talking around, the title character: part of the point of the Girl Detective is her ability to change shape, both master of disguise and a bit of everyone's dream. It's told in lots of short bits; there are no ghosts in this one, but tales of alligators in the sewers, lots of lost homework, and a live woman who claims to be Amelia Earhart.
(I borrowed this, and Magic for Beginners, from the library because Link is one of the guests of honor at the upcoming Wiscon. Similar curiosity, years ago, about the GoH at a con I had already decided to attend started me reading Pat Cadigan.)
Tags:
