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A review by matthewcpeck
Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell
5.0
I read Karen Russell’s 2nd collection of short fiction after I read her novel ‘Swamplandia!’ but before I read her debut collection, ‘St. Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised By Wolves’. Although ‘Wolves’ is more controlled and consistent – almost to the point of being an episodic novel – ‘Vampires’ is more eclectic and it reaches greater heights. I’m always more drawn to risky, sloppy art than I am to perfect little baubles anyway.
Russell still has an uncanny knack for writing about teens, most presciently in the creepy bullying parable that ends the book, ‘The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis’. But she extends both age range and geography in this collection – centuries-old married vampires in Italy, a lonely middle-aged masseuse in Wisconsin. There is an all-out comedy/satire piece about rooting for the Krill team to beat the Whales, which reminds me of pre-2004 Red Sox fans. There is ‘Reeling for the Empire’, about a cramped factory of hybrid silkworm-women in early industrial Japan, that are forced to secrete threads of colored silk from their bodies after drinking laced tea. This tale, which culminates in a harrowing revenge plot, is as darkly perfect as a Grimm fairy tale or a Twilight Zone episode.
I’ll concur with Joy Williams in the New York Times and admit that ‘The Seagulls Descend on Strong Beach’ and ‘The New Veterans’ are the two weaker stories in the collection, the former in particular. But the characters and details are still so vivid and affecting, it doesn’t matter much.
For me, the jaw-dropping, dream-invading masterwork is ‘Proving Up’, the first-person narrative of a boy in the 1840s Nebraska wilderness. Settlers are required to have a glass windows in their hovels in order to ‘prove up’ and become titled landowners, and our protagonist gets caught in an apocalyptic blizzard while trying to deliver his family’s precious window pane to their closest neighbor, before the federal ‘Agent’ shows. And then things get stranger. There are shades of Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx, Stephen King – it’s like this story was written for me.
Now for the bad news - I've read everything this writer has published, and I have to wait...
Russell still has an uncanny knack for writing about teens, most presciently in the creepy bullying parable that ends the book, ‘The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis’. But she extends both age range and geography in this collection – centuries-old married vampires in Italy, a lonely middle-aged masseuse in Wisconsin. There is an all-out comedy/satire piece about rooting for the Krill team to beat the Whales, which reminds me of pre-2004 Red Sox fans. There is ‘Reeling for the Empire’, about a cramped factory of hybrid silkworm-women in early industrial Japan, that are forced to secrete threads of colored silk from their bodies after drinking laced tea. This tale, which culminates in a harrowing revenge plot, is as darkly perfect as a Grimm fairy tale or a Twilight Zone episode.
I’ll concur with Joy Williams in the New York Times and admit that ‘The Seagulls Descend on Strong Beach’ and ‘The New Veterans’ are the two weaker stories in the collection, the former in particular. But the characters and details are still so vivid and affecting, it doesn’t matter much.
For me, the jaw-dropping, dream-invading masterwork is ‘Proving Up’, the first-person narrative of a boy in the 1840s Nebraska wilderness. Settlers are required to have a glass windows in their hovels in order to ‘prove up’ and become titled landowners, and our protagonist gets caught in an apocalyptic blizzard while trying to deliver his family’s precious window pane to their closest neighbor, before the federal ‘Agent’ shows. And then things get stranger. There are shades of Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx, Stephen King – it’s like this story was written for me.
Now for the bad news - I've read everything this writer has published, and I have to wait...