Magic for Beginners

Starred review from June 6, 2005
The nine stories in Link's second collection are the spitting image of those in her acclaimed debut, Stranger Things Happen
: effervescent blends of quirky humor and pathos that transform stock themes of genre fiction into the stuff of delicate lyrical fantasy. In "Stone Animals," a house's haunting takes the unusual form of hordes of rabbits that camp out nightly on the front lawn. This proves just one of several benign but inexplicable phenomena that begin to pull apart the family newly moved into the house as surely as a more sinister supernatural influence might. The title story beautifully captures the unpredictable potential of teenage lives through its account of a group of adolescent schoolfriends whose experiences subtly parallel events in a surreal TV fantasy series. Zombies serve as the focus for a young man's anxieties about his future in "Some Zombie Contingency Plans" and offer suggestive counterpoint to the lives of two convenience store clerks who serve them in "The Hortlak." Not only does Link find fresh perspectives from which to explore familiar premises, she also forges ingenious connections between disparate images and narrative approaches to suggest a convincing alternate logic that shapes the worlds of her highly original fantasies.

June 1, 2005
An all-night convenience store's regular customers include zombies and a beautiful woman who drives a car full of ghost dogs. Some middle-aged guys in a basement playing cards call up one of those phone lines and listen to a little-girl's voice tell about how one of them is being haunted by many versions, at different ages, of his ex-wife. A guy just out of prison crashes a teenagers' drinking party and drives off with the hostess' six-year-old brother (it's not what you think, or doesn't seem to be). A middle-class family moves from Manhattan to a suburban house; almost immediately, parts of the house and things that they moved into it become haunted; well, at least there are all those rabbits on guard, maybe, on the lawn. Each of these stories is much stranger than it sounds. You'd like to know what happens after they end but aren't sure about what happened in them. Move over, Russell Edson. Link is the purest, most distinctive surrealist in America, and she doesn't stop at prose-poem length.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)