The Otherworldly Magic and Ordinary Delights of Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble

Get in Trouble is her fourth collection, and it delves more deeply than its predecessors into what fantasy can do, how it can illuminate truths about parenthood, self-sacrifice, identity, love, and making your own luck. The stories are set in places where, at any moment, you might step into a sinkhole of weird, or crawl out a window or up the stairs into an utterly new realm. In “Two Houses,” the passengers on a mysterious spaceship gather for a birthday party and to swap stories, as the ship around them changes its appearance to match the settings of their increasingly frightening tales. These hair-raising narrative oddities are embedded within an already uncanny story, mysteries within a mystery. “The Lesson” follows two men waiting on the birth of their son via a surrogate; they travel to an island for a friend’s wedding, but both the island and the unseen groom pulse with a strange malice, echoing their fears about their unborn child.
Link has a way with teen characters, as vividly proven in 2008’s YA collection, Pretty Monsters. Here, “The New Boyfriend” follows frenemies Immy and Ainslie, one blessed with a mom rich enough to buy her paranormal “boyfriends” (they come in a box, mass market), the other consumingly jealous of her friend’s latest acquisition: a Ghost Boyfriend with an eerie manufacturer’s glitch. “Secret Identity” takes place in a hotel playing host to both a dentists’ and a superheroes’ convention (again the ordinary occupies the same space as the anything-but) and is told in the form of a long letter written by a schoolgirl to the internet boyfriend she’s meant to meet there. The boyfriend (dentist or superhero?) moves unseen through the story’s edges, while she is its awkward, heartsore heart. In collection opener “The Summer People,” another lonely teen serves as caretaker to a houseful of unseen supernaturals, whose neediness isn’t quite worth the strange gifts they give her. When a fellow misfit reaches out, our heroine reaches back, in unexpected ways.
A Link story is equal parts numinous and grounded, like a dishwashing scene depicted in stained glass, or a gas station that doubles as a dreamland portal (see: “The Hortlak,” in 2005’s Magic for Beginners). It’s tempting to try to parse her magic, as she draws you sentence by sentence into places of thrilling strangeness. The enchantment grows in the spaces between the words, where your mind begins to worry at the images she’s fed it, until you find her dreamworlds beginning to affect your own.
Get in Trouble is on sale now.