Eight years! That’s how long it’s been since Kelly Link’s last collection, Get in Trouble. I say this not as any sort of authorial admonishment, but to underscore how fervently a Link fan might have been waiting. All but one of the stories in her new collection, White Cat, Black Dog, have appeared elsewhere, so if you are particularly good at following breadcrumbs, you may have seen some of them. But to have these seven stories all in one volume is to appreciate the sheer reach of Link’s imagination—and the connective fairy-tale tissue that binds these particular works.
Each of these stories lists, under its title, its fairy tale origin. But I think it would be incorrect—incomplete, maybe—to call these simple retellings. “Fairy tales are the skeletons of story, perhaps,” Kate Bernheimer wrote in “Fairy Tale is Form, Form is Fairy Tale.” Link’s stories are like new cathedrals built on those bones.
In that same essay, Bernheimer identifies four elements of fairy tales: flatness, abstraction, intuitive logic, and normalized magic. Part of what Link does so brilliantly, I think, is revel in those last two while playing around with the first two. In “The White Cat’s Divorce,” characters are types, without names, but Link layers real-world specificity over the unexplained magic of a talking cat who runs a pot farm in Colorado. How the white cat can talk is irrelevant (she says as much), but despite being in the land of talking cats, laws are laws in the United States, and one may run afoul of the TSA if one tries to take pot on the plane.
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The man who stumbles upon this pot farm is on a quest given to him and his brothers by their father, who sees his own children only as reminders of his mortality. I had never thought of the granting of a quest as a way for parents to get their children out of the house, but it does do the trick, at least for a time. Though it does not have the cheeriest of outcomes for the father.
Parenting, though, is generally somewhat fraught in fairy tales—if the parents survive at all—and that remains true here, as well. In “The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear” a professor is repeatedly stymied on her way home to her wife and daughter; she swims in the purgatory of the empty and eerie hotel pool while she waits for an available flight, and she thinks about a looming appointment on her calendar, one she cannot miss; she worries that her daughter, Dido, may have inherited her unspecified condition. This story is a masterpiece of atmosphere; you know, all along, that something is off, but only in the last page does the creature that haunts the story show its face.
“The Lady and the Fox” is a lovely take on “Tam Lin,” the most straight retelling in some ways but also one that layers strange worlds on stranger ones: Young Miranda is the goddaughter of a very wealthy woman, and her Christmas visits to the Honeywell mansion are already a journey from her normal life into something quite foreign. The man she meets in the snow (who she can only meet in the snow, because rules are important in fairy tales) opens a door to yet another world, and Miranda takes that one, too, in stride.
Like the orphans and motherless children of so many fairytales, most of Link’s characters have endured loss—lost parents, missing lovers, a loss of a whole old world (“The White Road,” the most haunting of these tales, is an echoing ghost from a strange future). But one of Link’s most particular magics is that while she takes her characters’ emotions quite seriously—even the streamlined emotions of fairytales—she also understands and employs the wryest, most precise sense of humor. Things are funny-weird and funny-ha-ha. If you have laughed at a Link story before, even as it gave you goosebumps, you will find that same artful hand in these stories, sly, wise, knowing, and always surprising. The last story, “Skinder’s Veil,” may be the most of all these things at once; the story of a grad student housesitting in a peculiar location, it has the inevitability of a dream, the kind of logic that might not math, but all the same, you understand it on some secret, hidden level. That is Link’s magic: she makes the impossible seem matter-of-fact, the ordinary seem freshly washed with fairy dust.
I would like to attend a symposium in which passionate and erudite Kelly Link fans give talks about why their own personal favorite story in each of her collections is their favorite; I am certain that every single one has its champions. (I am also certain that a lot of people would want to talk about “Magic for Beginners,” from her second collection of the same name.) For me, in this collection, that story is “Prince Hat Underground,” in which a man named Gary goes in search of his lover, Prince Hat, who has a tendency to walk out of their life. When this happens, Gary goes and gets him, and Prince Hat comes home. This time, Prince Hat has gone much, much farther away, and Gary will have to cross oceans and talk to snakes and make his way through the dark until he finds exactly where his love has gone. “Late in middle age, one does not expect to find oneself in a fairy tale,” Gary thinks. But why shouldn’t middle age be a time for new adventures, surprising locations, bittersweet romantic triumphs?
This story is based on “East of the Sun, West of the Moon,” though that tale (an ancestor of Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”) does not feature a queen of hell who is something of a basic bitch, blood-filled waterbed aside. In the details and aches of a long relationship, Link draws us a story of love steadfast and sturdy, love faced with the end that faces us all. It breaks my heart and it stitches it right up again. I want to brunch at a restaurant called Folklore. I want next year to get here, and with it Link’s first novel. I want to read every fairy tale I know rewritten in her wise and unmatched style. But these seven are quite the spell on their own.
White Cat, Black Dog is published by Random House.
Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Twitter.
