Although I knew she was recently a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her novel Swamplandia!, I hesitated, at first, to read Karen Russell’s new collection of eight stories. This was mostly out of fear that a collection with “vampires” in the title would be too whimsical, too childlike and too lighthearted for me to take seriously and enjoy. And certainly, the worlds that Russell dreams up in her stunning and beautifully imagined collection do differ substantially from the spaces I tend to favor in fiction. But the quality and emotional force of many of these fictions rank at the top with anything I’ve recently come across.
The stories take place all over the world: in a lemon grove in Italy, and an undisclosed location in late 1800s Japan; in the Midwest during the era of the Homestead Act, in Antarctica, in modern day Nebraska and then finally in New Jersey. What is particularly impressive about this is how real she makes each location feel — the family living out west during the Homestead Act lives in a home that is a “ball of pure earth.”
What’s great about this collection is that the locations themselves aren’t just wonderfully imagined — so are the plots and characters. The title story takes a genre-savvy twist on vampires (the narrator sucks blood only because that’s what the “stories suggested”), and in another fantastic story, “The Barn at the End of Our Term,” a group of United States presidents discover that they have been reborn as horses, trapped on a farm. Russell treats both of these topics with a rare and wonderful humor — literally making this reader laugh out loud.
While just as elaborately imaginative, some of these stories take a much darker turn. “Reeling for the Empire,” the best and most staggering piece in this collection, tells the story of a Japanese woman, Kitsune, in Japan during the reign of Emperor Meiji. In order to help her family, she signs her life over to working in a silk reeling factory. What she is unaware of, however, is that all of the women who go to this factory are made to produce the silk within their own bodies. A special tea that they are forced to drink transforms them into hybrid creatures, “part kaiko, silkworm caterpillar and part human female.” Though unquestionably Kafkaesque, this story’s force arises because of its powerful belief in hope against total despair; in a weird way, this story is outstanding precisely because it is not Kafka.
Interrupting the collection is a long story (56 pages) titled “The New Veterans,” which revolves around Beverly, a selfless woman who works at a massage clinic. In comes a veteran of the Iraq war, Derek, suffering from PTSD from the traumatic death of fellow soldier. The story starts out well enough, and the initial scenes between the two make this reader feel a presence in the story. But, unfortunately, this story drags on and on way longer than necessary. And the consequence is that the ending seems not only emotionally unaffecting, but also long over-due.
But not to worry, for the final, haunting story of this collection, “The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis,” runs roughly the same length but sustains itself both in plot and in language. The narrator, a young boy named Larry Rubbio, discovers an eerie scarecrow tied to an enormous tree where he and his friends (a gang of three other boys nicknamed “Camp Dark”) tend to hang out. Aside from the scarecrows ectopic presence (“A scarecrow did not belong in our city of Anthem, New Jersey,” the narrator thinks), the graveless doll frightens the boys when they notice that it resembles a boy named Erik Mutis, whom the gang constantly beat up in “animal silence.” Suspenseful, honest and funny, this story explores the nature of atonement in a remarkable and unforgettable way.
What links these fascinating stories together, finally, is their entrapment — Clyde, the vampire of the first story, seems stuck in his lemon grove; Kitsune in “Reeling” is trapped in a factory, Rutherford Hayes in “The Barn” is stuck not only in a horse’s body but also in the farm itself, Miles Zegner in “Proving Up, is stuck in the Midwest. Luckily for her characters, and for her readers, these nightmarish situations often move with “the logic of a frightening nursery rhyme;” eerie and despairing for the duration, but ultimately hopeful.
Recommendation: Absolutely read it. It will unlock your imagination, galvanize your feelings and make you laugh.
Booking It: Vampires in the Lemon Grove
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