Pretty Monsters – a pretty good book

By Kelly Link

I was alerted to this short story collection by a public radio review, or I may never have picked it off the shelf.  Fantasy/science fiction/scary stories are generally not to my taste, but the NPR reviewer made Kelly Link’s writing sound intriguing – and it is.

No two stories in this nine-book collection are alike, though they are uniformly well-written and compelling.  My favorite story was “The Wizards of Perfil,” which felt like a fairy tale or fable for grown-up kids, but all the stories pulled me along, made me think, made me shiver (but not stay up at night), and sometimes made me laugh.  None of them ended the way I expected they might – and sometimes barely seemed to end at all – but somehow they satisfied anyway.

Award-winning illustrator Shaun Tan’s drawings introduce each story with an image that winks at the story to come.  Kelly Link has authored two other short story collections, and her stories have won multiple literary awards for the fantasy/science fiction genres.

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