Camille Grier
How Strange Can Death, Love and Fear Actually Get? A Review of Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen
Stranger Things Happen. Kelly Link. Small Beer Pres. 2001. 266 pp. $16.00 (paperback).
Death, Love and fear, three aspects of human life all people can relate through in different ways. Being that they are something everyone has in common, how strange can death, love and fear actually get? This question will be answered in one read of Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen where the simple answer is extremely strange. Death, love and fear are all recurring themes in each of Kelly Link’s stories. A collection of seemingly average along with oddly peculiar characters fill the pages of the book in stories of the unordinary, whether its twin sisters living in a castle with twenty-four chimneys and “there are more sofas, more china shepherdesses with chipped fingers, fewer suits of armor. No moat” (57) or a dead man on a beach that can’t remember his name nor the name of his lover that may have been “Marly? Genevieve? Karla? Kitty? Soibhan? Marnie? Lynley? [or] Theresa? ”(24). Link is playing on the readers sense of what after-life may include and the meaning of life itself. Her use of humor and imagery as she incorporates the supernatural sets this piece and herself as an author apart from others. Readers will experience Link’s strange perceptions of what death, love and fear are like from different characters and stories the most notable two being, “Water off a Black Dog’s Back” and “Flying Lessons.”
Kelly Link’s story “Water off a Black Dog’s Back” is a story confronting the concept of loss. It begins as a figurative concept when Rachel asks, “Tell me what you could sooner do without, love or water… could you live without love or could you live without water?”(27) As this ties into the themes death, love and fear, it becomes strangely developed further into the loss of abstract things. Rachel’s mother, Mrs. Rook lost her leg and her father, Mr. Rook lost his nose. Mrs. Rook expresses to Rachel that if “you’ve never lost anything that you cared about, you’re not the sort to be marrying” (47). Essentially a person has to have lost something great to be capable of loving. The story evaluates Carroll’s (Rachel’s lover’s) fear to commit because he hasn’t lost anything at all. However, he in response ask Rachel what she has lost, leading to a dark unexpected turn the story takes. Rachel confesses to Carroll the loss of her twin sister who had drowned at young age. This distressed tone is subdued by a humorous ending. Carroll loses a finger to a dog bite and is thus capable of marriage, an ironic ending to one of Link’s strangest stories in the collection.
The best stories in Stranger Things Happen are arguably the strangest of them all. Readers may be fooled by its connotation because “Flying Lessons” is a bright title for a dark, disturbing tale. The events of the story are unexpected and fairly odd however what is most interesting is the structure of the story; as the events go in a chronological order, sections are broken and inserted are sequential directions to hell, where one of the characters ends up and another seeks to follow. “Flying Lessons” is a bizarre love story between characters June and Humphrey. When the lovers first meet a funny conversation strikes but Link soon gives a vivid description of the morbid death of Humphrey’s mother that led to his fear of birds and then later describes the characteristics of each of Humphrey’s atypical aunts. June’s dreams of and encounters with Humphrey’s aunts are so bizarre that readers can find humor in them. The story has an utterly surprising, surreal and unfortunate ending that ties directly to the themes death, love and fear meanwhile leaving readers on the edge of their seats.
Stranger Things Happen is not a call to action nor is it a lighthearted means of entertainment. It is an evocative collection of stories that feed on the realities of many people, while incorporating the supernatural and being filtered through Kelly Link’s bizarre perceptions of death, love and fear in today’s world. The imagery and humor give readers an experience of afterlife and life itself unlike any other.
- About Kelly Link
- Description of Stranger Things Happen
- NPR Review of Stranger Things Happen
- Interview with Kelly Link
Class Book Review Project 