Fantastic Metropolis

At the 1998 World Fantasy Convention in Monterey, my first con as a professional, I met Ellen Datlow. She introduced herself and asked if I’d like to try to write a story for her new webzine, Event Horizon. This would turn out to be a very important meeting for me, since in the intervening years I’ve written a number of stories for her and learned a great deal about writing short fiction in the process. This initial meeting was important for another reason as well, because standing next to Ellen was a seemingly shy young woman, whom she introduced as Kelly Link. I asked her if she was a writer and she just nodded. That was about it for that meeting. I filed her name away with all the names of other people I’d met for the first time that weekend. My mental filing system might as well just be a shredder, because even though I can remember all the words to the theme song of the cartoon show Tobor, The Eighth Man from when I was six, in the windy caverns behind my eyes, names usually have a half life of about ten minutes.

When I got back home to New Jersey from Monterey, I started working on a story. Some time passed and then it struck me that it might not be a bad idea to check out Event Horizon and see what Ellen was publishing there. The day I brought up the site, there was a new story, “The Specialist’s Hat.” Back then, I didn’t like to read on-line all that much (I’ve gotten better about it as the years have gone by), but I figured I’d give this story a couple of paragraphs and see what it was all about. I started reading, and a paragraph was all it took, because then I was hooked. When I got to the end, I shook my head and tried to retrace what had just happened in the fiction. The story was an elegant, enchanting creepshow. I mean that in only the best sense of each of those appellations. I read it again right away, and then a couple of days later I read it a third time. It was on this third reading that I thought to check who the author was, and I saw the name, Kelly Link. The name sounded familiar, and before the day was out, I remembered where I’d heard it.

For the next few days I tried to track down other stories by Link, but they were few and far between. The ones I found all had the same qualities of deceptive simplicity; an odd and affective alchemy in the straight forward sentences and style. The imagination in them was startlingly unconventional and the craftsmanship of the writing was remarkable. There was a palpable tension created in the byplay of the wild, idiosyncratic imagination and a judicious, editorial restraint. I wondered about an effect I noticed where even the digressions seemed vitally important to the story at large; in fact, the digressions were of the utmost importance. I tried to compile a complete bibliography of this writer, and then set about trying to acquire her other work.

It was a while before her collection, Stranger Things Happen, was finally published. I can’t think of another contemporary story collection I anticipated with as much readerly excitement as this one. I got a copy when it came out, opened it and started reading, and, man, the hits just kept on coming. “Louise’s Ghost,” “Travels with the Snow Queen,” “The Girl Detective,” etc. It was a field day. I got a chance to read some of the other ones I’d been unable to get a hold of before. One of the things I noted about the stories was that many of them had this kind of haunting quality, and I saw a connection between it and the fact that these stories did not mean to mean. They very often didn’t move toward any kind of definable or concrete resolution. As a reader, you entered into a real collaboration with the writer. Link was offering experience, and you as the reader were expected to bring the “meaning.” Only in the act of being read were these pieces completed, and it was evident that the results would vary with each individual who turned his or her attention to them. It’s not that the stories were unfinished, but that they were open.

Another aspect of the stories that struck me was that they were often driven by structure (“The Girl Detective” is a good example of what I mean). There was a noticeable architecture to them, and it wasn’t your old man’s story structure—a Fichtean curve with conflict, climax, resolution. When writers create “experimental” stories, the experiment part often shows up in the manner in which the piece is constructed. Nothing bores me more than novelty for its own sake in fiction. Readers of some of my own stories with wonky structures might cast the same criticism, and in some cases I’d be hard put to disagree. Link is a structuralist to an extent; her works are architectonic, but not in the sense that Henry Miller referred to Thomas Mann as a brick layer. In Link’s more successful pieces, which would be just about all of them, it’s as impossible to separate structure and story as it would be to separate conjoined twins sharing a heart. The structure informs the story as the story informs the structure. There’s a kind of vital geometry involved in the creation of these pieces.