White Cat, Black Dog: Stories by Kelly Link
I would like to thank Head of Zeus for an advance copy of this collection in exchange for a fair and honest review.
Publisher - Ad Astra
Published - Out Now
Price - £20 hardcover £6.99 Kindle eBook
Leaving behind the enchanted castles, deep, dark woods and gingerbread cottages of fairytales for airport waiting rooms, alien planets and a cannabis farm run by a team of hospitable cats, White Cat, Black Dog offers a fresh take on the stories that you thought you knew.
Here you'll find stoner students, failing actors and stranded professors questing for love, revenge or even just a sense of purpose. Poised on the edges between magic, modernity and mundanity, White Cat, Black Dog will delight, beguile, occasionally horrify, and remind you once again of why Kelly Link is incomparable in the realm of short fiction.
How much does any retelling need to reference the original story? In sone it’s pretty much the original story but with a new perspective but another option is just the author to play with the bones of a tale and build a very different body for it. In Kelly Link’s beguiling White Cat, Black Dog we get a great collection of tales that use folk tales as the basis for some very different stories that knowing nothing of the source material will not prevent you having a great time reading them.
Starting off with the opening tale The White Cat’s Divorce reads like a folk tale mix of Succession and Wes Anderson tales as a greedy billionaire fearing death sends his children out to get impossible items so he has not got to fear seeing them age and see his own mortality staring at him. Link though makes this tale playfully work so it almost seems natural for a group of cats to run a recreational cannabis farm and then have one bell the slightly lost but good youngest son out. Then towards the end the tale gets darker and bloodier yet still managed to hold your attention.
Prince Hat Underground is a tale of a lover kidnapped by the Queen of Hell but in this case our Prince Hat if part of a middle aged gay couple based in New York. It is though about loving someone warts and all - knowing all their imperfections and still knowing they are the one for you. Link takes us to Iceland; the route to Hell underneath it and a strange assortment of charcters to we go to hell. It’s messy; icky, loving and one of my favourites in the collection and having older characters as the focus is a refreshing change and works better for the tale too.
A much more ominous tale awaits in The White Road a post apocalyptic tale mixing a group of Mail carriers and entertainers crossing a dangerous version of the US where a mysterious white road on the edge of vision can spell ruin for anyone. Link has a wonderful sense of build up dropping hints all is not well - corpses on display in living rooms; little superstitions and then leads to a horrific climax. How far will you ever got to save your skin and those of others? It’s nightmarish without ever fully explaining itself and leaves the reader to judge did the right thing happen and there are no easy answers.
Sone horror is best never explained and in The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear there are secrets kept and never revealed but we suspect the answers are devastating. A college professor is kept away from her wife and child thanks to airport delays. She has a medical appointment she cannot meet. Link uses the dislocation of waiting endlessly in airports to add pressure and stress to the situation creating a strange not quite right reality where people all resemble each other; revelations may have bearing on our narrator and their own unexplainable condition may be about to erupt. It’s got a sense of menace all the way through and yet very little truly horrible happens. Impressive storytelling!
With The Lady and The Fox have an almost English style tale of a young lady staying with a wealthy family every Christmas and being treated almost as one: yet every Christmas she meets a strange man who hangs outside. Link captures growing up; first lusts and loves; standing up for what you want and it’s ultimately a warm tale that I enjoyed a lot.
In Skinder’s Veil which I’ve had the pleasure of reading we get a strange wandering tale where a student meets his housemate’s girlfriend who gets constantly visited by an unseen ghost who finds her boyfriend repellent; then we move to a house he must sit with two rules – always let people in who are at the back door and never allow the owner Skinder inside. Link weaves in little dark folk tales that may or may not impact the story and it gets strangely weirder and uneasy as we wonder what happens when the front door is opened. A dark magical mythical tale that suggests so many strange things out there are still to find.
This is a hugely enjoyable set of stories and even when I didn’t know the source tale I had a lot of fun. Where I did I enjoyed the changes made. It’s definitely reminded me to try more of Link’s work and well worth your time if your enjoy unusual spins on classic tales as well as gorgeous storytelling.
