Review of White Cat, Black Dog: Stories by Kelly Link

Kelly Link’s fourth (or fifth?) collection was a surprise. 

I remember liking less than half of her stories from her previous collections and I liked only half of these. But taken as a whole, reading the entirety of her work is worth the effort. Though I find the quality inconsistent there is a generally pleasing dreamlike aura to most of the stories. They are slow-paced and mature. There is a slight obsession with gender and sexuality. She is basically a mix between Angela Carter and Shirley Jackson. Her style is unadorned, simply plain, and meanders along like a current of a lazy river. You can recline into the flow and be carried along. They never sweep you away in an onrush of imagery or action, and they never send you plummeting through a cascade. They are long journeys with just enough detail to tantalize, and stir the mists of the imagination into motion.

When she is good she is really F’ing good. These are the kind of magical realist fairy tales that probably took years to write. They contain echoey depths. The perimeters of the stories are fuzzy, so that if you inhabit them too long, and let your mind wander into the shadows, you are likely to find greater mysteries waiting beyond the borders.

The first three stories really gripped me. The first: an absurdist tale relying heavily on the ‘rule of three’ about a wealthy eccentric demanding ever more ridiculous gifts from his three sons and the unbelievable occurrences encountered as a result, which culminate in a wacky and delightful ruse of anachronistic storytelling tropes out of the Arabian Nights combined with signature stoner wastoid musings. The theme of stoner wastoid musings is highly developed in the other stories as well and represents a throughline for this collection.

The next story was also a captivating descent into a purgatory alongside bizarre and quirky characters, each of whom suffer and fail and vie for the reader’s attention. The inner same-sex love story was unconvincing. When you spend years with someone, supposedly loving them, how could you allow them to not tell you about their past? How could you live with a mystery for years, pretending that love was all that mattered, even in the face of horrors unknown? A false backstory for Prince Hat would have sufficed. But the focus of the story is the frustration and strange strategies of the protagonist and the antagonist – the latter being the strange girlfriend. Both initial stories make use of the ‘rule of three’ and lean heavily into enchantment. The settings are vivid and weird, but docile. The environments do not pose a threat. The people and sentient creatures are both sinister and far too hospitable. Any excess of hospitality in fairy tales is a sign that something will go horribly wrong.

The next story, about a person trapped between an airport and a hotel, who becomes infatuated with the facility pool, was fascinating and haunting. A brilliant immersion in a twilight zone of frozen time. It posits that the quiet, liminal moments we often fail to recognize can have a transformative power.

Then followed several unmemorable stories. Some of them, or pieces of them I thought were objectively bad. What did they accomplish? What were they about? They might as well have not even been there for all I cared about them. I was about to give up on the collection when I came to the final long story.

The final story, thankfully, was magnificent. It reminded me of Murakami with its wastoid stoner slacker setup, a contrived scenario into which I was allowed to immediately escape. The cabin in the woods. The indecisive narrator distracted from his work by a surreal slip into uncanny fairy tale encounters. It proceeded unpredictably and contained several engaging mini stories within the story. The ending was possibly meaningless, though you could read all kinds of meanings into it if you wanted. The patented ambiguity of Link’s endings is frustrating but often irresistible.

I may have to revisit her other collections. The authors style of imitating and repurposing fairy tales is old hat in my opinion, but they so seldom resemble anything else I’ve seen that if she has to use the ingredients of folklore in order to whip up inspired retellings, if that is what gets the job done, then so be it.

Should short story collections take years to compile? Should writers feel obligated to add novels to their bibliography? For writers like Link and George Saunders, I feel like they’re too popular to be niche and too niche to be popular. They are liminal. But their strength lies in their uniqueness. The experimental fiction I prefer makes use of ordinary language to conjure new combinations of imagery and metaphor. I prefer that to the messily experimental sentences of Arno Schmidt or anyone else labeled Avant-garde. In the end, memorability counts for more in my opinion.