Catching Up on Kelly Link

Cross-posted at Smithereens

It’s been a whole week since I first said « I need to blog about Kelly Link’s short story ! »: this has become my mantra for the week (Kelly-Link-Kelly-Link-Kelly-Link)… except I didn’t do anything. It’s one of those things that wouldn’t have happened but for blogs and virtual reading groups (namely A Curious Singularity): I would have missed Kelly Link’s short story: The Specialist’s Hat. There are lots of reasons why I wouldn’t have picked up her short story: the strange title, the fantastic genre, the mention of dreams. But I had half an hour to go in between meetings and forced myself a little into reading it: “Why not?” (to be totally honest, the meetings promised to be boring and I wanted to have something to daydream about, just in case)… The result is that I still shiver from this short story 10 days later, but I don’t quite know why.

I won’t tell anything about the story itself, but it actually doesn’t matter so much. Let’s just say you are forced into a dream, or rather a nightmare, and you can’t control anything anymore. I tried hard to think of what gives to this story a dream-like quality: the inner logic and absurdity, a sense of fatality, of feeling doomed (you know from the very first sentence that it’s going to go wrong — “When you’re Dead,” Samantha says, “you don’t have to brush your teeth.”), the mix between detailed information and a very fuzzy setting and action – the jury is still out on what really happens at the end of the story and who exactly is The Specialist. In some aspects it resembles traditional children tales (especially when it comes to the twin main characters, the fact that their mother died and their father is absent and neglectful –unless you choose a scarier interpretation-, and the insistence on numbers), but the very darkest ones. It reminded me of Freudian interpretations of myths and stories by Bettelheim like Bluebeard or Little Red Riding Hood. I read it a long while ago but I remember being struck by the darkness of the original tales collected by the brothers Grimm.

I’m not sure I will dare venture into other stories by Kelly Link before a while, not because they aren’t good, but just on the contrary, because I find them very impressive and… slightly too efficient!

A Special Kind of Creepy

Kelly Link's story The Specialist's Hat is a fantastic ghost story that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I love Kelly Link. Her style is so straightforward and Anglo-Saxon with few fancy Lantinate words. Her style is the kind I always imagine I would use if I were ever to write short stories (please, no one get your hopes up on that or you can breath a sigh of relief--your choice).

The story is about ten-year-old twins Claire and Samantha who lost their mother exactly 282 days ago. They and their father are now living at Eight Chimneys, a huge mansion, while the father researches and writes about the former occupant, Charles Cheatham Rash, a very bad poet. The poet and his fourteen-year-old daughter disappeared in 1907 and no one knows what happened to them.

The father spends his days writing and drinking too much and then going out into the woods for a walk after dark. The girls spend their day following the caretaker around as he gives tours of the mansion to tourists and generally trying to amuse themselves.

The caretaker, Mr. Coeslak, seems to be a nice old man with a certain grandfatherly affection for the twins. He warns them to not go into the woods, but if they do stay on the marked paths otherwise they might get bit by a copperhead snake. He also tells them the house is haunted and they should never go into the attic. Of course the girls try to get in the attic but the door is locked.

One day their father, who has met a woman in the woods, goes to meet her there for an evenng picnic and star-gazing. The girls are left with a babysitter arranged by the caretaker.

After exhausting all the card games, the twins decide they want to play at being dead, their favorite game:

The Dead game is a let's pretend that they have been playing every day for 274 days now, but never in front of their father or any other adult. When they are Dead, they are allowed to do anything they want to. They can even fly, by jumping off the nursery beds, and just waving their arms. Someday this will work, if they practice hard enough.
The Dead game has three rules.

One. Numbers are significant...

Two. The twins don't play the Dead game in front of grownups...

Three is the best and most important rule. When you are Dead, you don't have to be afraid of anything.

And at this point in the story you know, in the pit of your stomach things aren't going to turn out well.

Up to this point the story has been told in a non-linear progression. The story opens with the twins and the babysitter playing the Dead game, then goes back to how the twins came to live at Eight Chimneys, returns to the near present, then to a history of the house and the poet, then to a different point of time, until finally the tension is ratcheted up high and we are at the present moment and continue on in the present to the end of the story. All of this is interspersed with pieces of poetry by Rash the poet. We also get a this blurb of house history from one of the books in the giftshop that the twins have looked at:

And so he had a wife, and they say she was real pretty. There was another man who wanted to go with her, and first she wouldn't, because she was afraid of her husband, and then she did. Her husband found out, and they say he killed a snake and got some of this snake's blood and put it in some whiskey and gave it to her. He had learned this from an island man who had been on a ship with him. And in about six months snakes created in her and they got between her meat and the skin. And they say you could just see them running up and down her legs. They say she was just hollow to the top of her body, and it kept on like that till she died. Now my daddy said he saw it.
-- An Oral History of Eight Chimneys

This bit comes fairly early in the story and afterwards snakes seem to pop up everywhere from warnings about the snakes in the woods to the fireplace snake-pokers the girls pretend duel with.

As if all that weren't enough, the babysitter adds the figure of the Specialist, some sort of magician from Mulatuppu (on the east coast of Panama). The Specialist has a hat that makes noises. One of the noises the hat makes is like a snake.

I can't really say more without giving away too much. I will say the girls get into the attic, the hat makes an appearance, and perhaps the Specialist shows up. The Dead games also turns serious and there is more snakiness. I think I gasped out loud at least once or twice while reading. It was a fun story. Just creepy enough to make me shiver but not so creepy that it gave me nightmares.

Cross-posted at So Many Books

Kelly Link's "The Specialist's Hat"

From Adventures in Reading:

I discovered Kelly Link by accident. I was looking for something good, fun, and fantasy-esque to read and I stumbled across Magic For Beginners. I then found myself a little in love with Link.

"The Specialist's Hat" has a great deal going on through theme, build-up, and playing on some of the creepier aspects of childhood. Twins Samantha and Claire are "half-orphaned" after their mother passes away and now find themselves with their academic father, whose researching a "bad" and little-known faux poet Rash, living in the haunted house and museum Eight Chimneys. The story is interspersed with the poetry of Rash and narrative describing the house.

What could have been an obvious story is told with a certain children's quality, a simplistic view, and a child's observation. The story unfolds matter of factly, but flows into the unresolved ending that Link so often uses.

As a reader, it's curious to investigate what's real and what's not real within "The Specialist's Hat," and Link provides well-balanced detail that never resolves this issue: Who is the woman in the woods? Is the baby sitter the dead daughter of Rash? What is the specialist's hat? Is that the Specialist or really the father? What the hell is the Specialist? Is this a story about the over active imagination of two bored, little girls staying up late and ultimately recovering from the recent death of their mother or is Eight Chimneys truly a haunted house with a "gonna getcha" ending?

Next Up for Discussion

The story selected to serve as the focus of our next discussion is Kelly Link's "The Specialist's Hat".

Our discussion will begin tomorrow (October 14th); members of the group are invited to begin posting their thoughts on the story then. Click on the title of the story above to access it online.

If you're not yet a member of the group and you would like to join, please e-mail me. New members are always welcome! Of course, anyone can contribute to the discussion through the comments sections of the posts without officially joining the group.

I also invite everyone to think ahead to next month and nominate stories for discussion in November.

Vote for this Month's Story Selection!

The three stories that have been nominated to serve as the focus of our next discussion, scheduled to begin on Tuesday, October 14th are:

Roberto Bolaño's "Àlvaro Rousselot's Journey";

Etgar Keret's "Loquat"; and,

Kelly Link's "The Specialist's Hat".

Please let me know, in the comments section below this post or via email, which of these stories you would prefer to discuss this month.

Fall Reading Nominations

As September is already slipping away, I wanted to jump start the conversation on the Fall short story selections. Certainly any suggestions are welcome and two of my own are Kelly Link's "The Specialist's Hat" and Etgar Keret's "Loquat."

Jackie Kay's "Wish I Was Here"

From Adventures in Reading:

I have been putting off reading A Curious Singularity's selection of “Wish I Was Here” by Jackie Kay for weeks now and I believe this has a lot to do with that I forgot to print out a copy of the story and instead had to read it on my laptop. Call me crazy, but if I can’t write in the margins or stick Post-Its all over it, I feel like I’m losing something in the reading experience.

“Wish I Was Here” is the story of Paula and Claudette. Two middle-aged women, single for years, who vacation together until Claudette meets her “New Lover” Jan. Paula now finds herself as the third wheel and realizes that not only can she not afford the new vacation destination, but that she’s not even particularly wanted there. This situation is further exacerbated as Paula apparently has some romantic attachments to Claudette. To surprise the couple, Paula shows up early and sneaks into Claudette and Jan’s hotel.

There are a lot of references to Brontë’s Villette, which I haven’t read, but which possibly adds layers of complexity I’m missing out on. Initially I was not particularly enjoying the story though by the end of it I had cracked a smile or two. Mostly though, Paula becomes increasingly drunk as she careens into the embarrassing climax of the story.

I found Kay’s story reminiscent of Elizabeth Berg’s recent short story collection The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted, making Kay’s (as well as Berg’s stories) “Wish I Was Here” a prototype affiliated with a form of female mid-life crisis, which is often represented as a sexual, romantic, and food related inner conflict. With “Wish I Was Here,” Kay leads the reader to the point of crisis where Paula begins her mantra of “‘You are not going to ruin Claudette’s holiday,’” which is exactly what is going to happen.

More often than not, I have no need or real interest in identifying with a character. I can enjoy a story just as much, if not more, even if I feel detached from the character. But I must say Paula is a particular character I feel little towards and have less interest in. If I want a female mid-life crisis, I’ll stick with Woody Allen’s Another Woman. However, I did find the internal dialog to be thoughtful and well-written and would be interested in reading more by Jackie Kay.

Jackie Kay: Wish I Was Here

Short Story Monday

This month's short story pick at A Curious Singularity is Jackie Kay's "Wish I Was Here."

I'll start things off by saying I didn't like it. But, I'll try to be a bit more diplomatic than that (after all Kate, the host of ACS, says "Kay is a brilliant short story writer as well," and calls her "one of [her] all time favourites").

So, here's the part where, when I'm in one of my more gentle moods, I try to begin with with something positive. I hope, in this case, my positive doesn't seem insincere or backhanded: the narrator and quasi-protagonist, Paula, is one of the most annoying and consistent characters I've read in quite some time. She made me think of Ned Flanders and poodles. That such an irritating character did not make me transfer that negative energy towards Kay herself was quite a feat. Perhaps Paula was most grating because she was believable: self-absorbed, self-pitying, judgemental and a lousy comedian to boot. We all know people like this, but I find it hard to have sympathy for such individuals.

If that's my positive, how bad can my negative be? It depends on your taste. Personally, I found the plot spread way too thin. Paula is trying to endure a vacation where she has to meet Claudette and her new lover, Jan. It is painfully obvious that Paula is jealous. There is no resolution. This might be your thing.

To end on a positive note, I liked the title. In fact, I think "Wish I Was Here" would have been better had nothing followed the title.

(Cross-posted at A Book Mine Set.)