Magic for Beginners

I picked up Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners at last year's Readercon because Readercon always makes me have good intentions to read more short fiction. Then I got it signed at the Monstrous Affections event in October, which gave me even more good intentions to read it. Then I decided to do the Women in Genre Fiction challenge this year, which seems to have finally been the critical mass of good intentions needed to motivate me to actually pick the book up and read it, when the exact thing happened that I was expecting to happen, which is that I began kicking myself for not reading it earlier.

Magic for Beginners is weird. It's fantasy, but the sort of fantasy that also skirts the borders of literary fiction and of magical realism and of translations of really old stories that sound weird to a modern audience because they use a different kind of story logic than we're quite used to. There's nine stories in the compilation and none of them are boring. The collection sort of eases you into the weird by starting off with The Faery Handbag, which uses a lot of traditional elements of well-known fairy tales from a variety of traditions, and weaves it into a new and increasingly unsettling fairy tale. After that, the stories are full of recognizable elements like ghosts and zombies but they don't work the way you're used to them working and they're not in quite the sorts of stories you're used to seeing them in. The zombies, for example, don't seem to be taking over the world or spreading or eating people or really causing much mayhem at all--certainly not a zombie apocalypse--they just keep showing up at an all-night convenience store and not buying anything. The real creepy element in that story is the pajamas.

Any one individual story could probably yield several really fun literary criticism papers, even the ones about people's marriages falling apart. One of the ones about a marriage falling apart is also about a haunted house, although it's not haunted by ghosts; it's haunted by bunnies. Another story about a marriage falling apart is an alien invasion story with lots of cloning. I personally prefer The Faery Handbag, and the one about the ghost television show, and--well, any of the ones where the main character is too young to be in a falling-apart marriage. That's on me as a reader, though. That I did like all nine of the stories no matter how much about marriage they were is a pretty impressive feat of writing by Kelly Link. There's quite a lot to say about any one of these stories, but I feel like I might have to be in conversation with someone else who's also read them in order to tease out what it is exactly I have to say. There's a lot of seemingly random, dreamlike stuff going on in all these pieces that I'm pretty sure are metaphor or analogues or catalysts or something like that for all the issues of regular life, but sometimes it's hard to figure out what they are. It's not as obvious as it usually is. Like, the zombies aren't mindlessly eating everybody in a thinly-veiled metaphor for inescapable consumerism and the insatiable demands of a growth-based capitalist economy. The zombies are the creatures that don't buy anything at the convenience store. So what are they and what are we supposed to do with them? I'm going to have to think about it.