White Cat, Black Dog: Stories by Kelly Link – forthcoming March 2023
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
In White Cat, Black Dog, Kelly Link has crafted a literally wonder-ful collection of stories for the delectation of lovers of folklore and fairy tales, replete with wit, imagination, and humanity.
Beneath the title of each of the seven stories, Link kindly tells us the name of the fairy tale which each is… Associated with? Inspired by? Linked to? She mostly sticks by the outlines of the traditional versions: a tyrannical king sending his sons out on absurd journeys; lovers separated by a vengeful witch or fairy; a troop of clever creatures outwitting evil ones, and so on. She adroitly adopts the soothing, almost incantatory voice of the storyteller… and then reshapes the story to drop it into a new context. The tyrannical king becomes a greedy and obscenely wealthy businessman and his youngest son finds his aid in a highly-advanced marijuana farm and production facility run by cats. The separated lovers are a gay couple hailing Uber to hit trendy bars, until one disappears; his loyal lover is led on the quest to find him by talking rats and an Icelandic snake (in an island country that has no snakes). The enchanted bride unexpectedly abandons her lover for the oligarch… but dispatches him in a final astutely manipulative stroke. Who could resist the forlorn and beautiful young man in gorgeous coat embroidered with the image of a tragically trapped fox, seeking only a young woman skillful enough to set the fox free and brave enough to hold onto him, no matter what? What seems to be a 19th-century troupe of itinerant actors are actually traversing a post-apocalyptic Tennessee landscape peopled by frightened survivors fending off murderous souls… Bremen town musicians? Really? Just when you think you know where you’re going, there is a disorienting turn, and you smile to yourself and think, Oh! Wait! That’s not what I thought… where is this going now?
It’s a lot of fun to see the spice Link adds to these old recipes, stirring in absurdities, modern ennui, danger, heartbreak, fear, and affection. But then, that’s how these stories work, isn’t it? They are to be borrowed, stolen from, embellished, twisted and tweaked, and passed along from hand to hand to be savored. Angela Carter is a noted practitioner of this art. But Carter can be so lush, so lurid, so overripe as to seep into a surfeit of blood and detail.
Link does not do this. Even in the less successful, overelaborate story “The Game of Smash and Recovery,” the Handmaid servant-creatures who “briskly” (what a perfect adverb here!) tear a vampire to shreds are also tender, clever, and protective. The scavenging cloaked vampires with “jellied skin” and “armies of teeth” also bow their long necks, dance, and “sing propitiatory songs.” They never tip over into sheer blood-and-guts horror grossness.
Link is wry, she is often funny; her characters patronize massage therapists who charge extra for removal of malevolent spirits, struggle over an unfinished dissertation and sexual awkwardness, curse copiously, use a cellphone light to navigate a haunted cavern. And she can turn a beautiful sentence: “[she] watches them go swooping, sail-winged, away and over the horizon beneath Home’s scatter of mismatched moons.” At the end of “The Bremen Town Musicians,” the narrator has escaped a violent death at a terrible cost, to himself and someone he loved dearly. He muses: “Perhaps someone who should not read this letter will read it as I once read Meredith’s letters and the letters of other men and women. But I do not hope. I do not hope but still I hope and do not know what I am hoping for.”
I’m hoping for yet more visiting bears, devoted lovers, embroidered foxes, honorable sons, and evil fairies doing Jazzercise in Hell, under a scatter of mismatched moons.
* Thanks to NetGalley for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.*
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