Get In Trouble (2015)

By Kelly Link

352pp, Fiction

Notes

2015-04-08

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that I love Kelly Link so I was always going to love Get In Trouble – though I expect I’ll never again feel the thrill of discovery I got from Magic For Beginners after I picked it up on a whim, knowing pretty much nothing of its provenance. Her work is just so consistently amazing. In this her latest collection the stories mostly hover around the ghost story end of the genre spectrum but obviously it’s not that simple. There’s a noticeable shift in the way Link deals with the mundane –- without wishing to spoil anything, in these stories it’s often the everyday which is more uncanny or disturbing than the supernatural, the prospect of a baby born prematurely is more frightening than the fact that your hotel room might be home to a giant savagely clawed rodent. Of course this has always been present in her work but Get In Trouble really goes all in.

Recommended.