Culture

Author: Kelly Link
Publisher: Text Publishing
(4/5)

   If you are looking for something short and bittersweet, this is the book for you. Pretty Monsters is a collection of short stories featuring everything from your childhood nightmares – werewolves, aliens, devils, ghosts, monsters – some pretty, some scary, some just trying to make their way in the world. All but the story from which the book takes its name have been published elsewhere at various times, meaning that each story paints a unique picture of a world that could nearly be our own. Shaun Tan’s illustrations, which appear in this edition paired with intriguing quotes from the stories, provide a nice interlude between the stories.
   Despite apparently being aimed at young adults, the book is surprisingly gripping, grim, and unselfconscious. Link’s deceptively straightforward narrative style is underpinned by sophisticated anthropological themes and social commentary. The stories eke out their own genre somewhere between fantasy, horror, and sci-fi, and range from the almost-too-believable to the bizarre. The collection kicks off with “Monster,” featuring that kid that every school has – the one who gets picked on – in his least favourite place, school camp. A campfire story becomes real, and children get eaten. Typical enough. Link’s bizarre imagination seeps through more strongly in “The Constable of Abal,” in which a girl who forgets that she is a girl finds that she has grown a penis – but this is the least of her identity problems. She has only the ghost in her pocket to confide in as she moves from town to town with her immoral mother.
   “The Surfer,” “Pretty Monsters,” and The Cinderella Game” all follow typical teenagers coping with typical teenage dramas, all with a supernatural twist. Little sisters, teenage crushes, and flu pandemics take on more sinister roles. They all leave you wanting a little bit more, wondering what will happen next, unsure of whether you are satisfied – but in a good way. Kelly Link sums up this feeling herself in “Pretty Monsters” “…whether you are a wolf or a girl. A girl or a monster or both…not everyone who reads a story feels the same way about how it ends.”