Gary K. Wolfe Reviews White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link – Locus Online

There are a great deal of things you can do with fairy tales, however leaving them alone doesn’t appear to be among them. Even the Brothers Grimm themselves tampered the stories they gathered, and numerous redactions, reinterpretations, satires, and improvisations have actually been with us practically as long as the tales themselves. Kelly Link has actually likewise visited this area prior to (“Travels with the Snow Queen”, “Shoe and Marriage”, “Catskin”), however White Cat, Black Dog is her very first collection committed to stories originated from particular fairy tale sources (though none of those 3 stories are consisted of, nor are any stories which were consisted of in earlier Link collections). Link’s technique to her products in these 7 stories is less like that of Jane Yolen (whose recent How to Fracture a Fairy Tale frequently looked for to unload the source tales in particular cultural contexts) and more like that of An­gela Carter, whose traditional 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories tended to treat the originals more like beginning points for her own dark fantasias. Link help­fully uses parenthetical subtitles offering each source tale, which in some cases provides the collec­tion a lively Where’s-Waldo tone, welcoming us to identify the initial, which might appear as an ingrained tale-within-a-tale or undergo a total reimagining, however is never ever anything as easy as metaphor or apologue. Shaun Tan’s typically mystical and evoca­tive illustrations contribute to this tone.

“The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear”, for instance, starts as a familiar and all too cred­ible travel problem: a popular teacher, nervous to go back to her better half and child after being commemorated at a conference, gets captured up in apparently unlimited flight hold-ups while spending nights in bleak hotels. Only when she lastly captures a flight and starts talking with her seatmates does she find out about the lady of the title, who ignored the ghosts in her haunted home. But already we’ve begun making our own con­nections in between Link’s essentially practical tale and the world of myth. Similarly, “Prince Hat Underground” starts as a relatively domestic secret when Prince Hat just strolls off one day with an odd female, leaving his spouse Gary to set out on a mission that even takes him to hell – however not up until towards completion do we discover a variation of the source tale, “East of the Sun, West of the Moon”. At times, Link can tug us in between worlds in a single sentence. “Skinder’s Veil”, which might be my preferred story in the collection (and another that includes a scholastic lead character), be­gins with the formula “Once upon a time” followed by “there was a graduate student in the summer of his fourth year who had not finished his dissertation” – barely the things of fairy tales, we may believe – up until it is. Such are the polarities that specify a lot of these tales. That college student accepts fill out as an alternative housesitter in a creepy home whose owner has actually enforced weird guidelines: if he himself appears, he’s not to be confessed, however anybody appearing at the back entrance ought to be allowed. The tale ultimately ends up being a derivation of “Snow White and Rose Red”, however with distinctively Link-esque twists, most especially the cool ending.

While fairy tales supply a thematic throughline in the collection, a number of the stories draw similarly on SF tropes. Prob­capably the most familiar story is “The Game of Smash and Recovery”, which appeared in no less than 4 year’s finest anthologies and made a Sturgeon Award. With its title’s unclear evocation of Cordwainer Smith and its commitment to Iain M. Banks, it reimagines Hansel and Gretel as Anat and Oscar, alone on a harmful world called Home while their moms and dads are postponed on a journey, helped by “Handmaids” and threatened by “vam­pires,” though obviously absolutely nothing is rather as it initially appears. “The White Road” includes a taking a trip business making their method through the ruins of a world changed by unspeci­fied catastrophes that caused the look of “white roads”, which may move or vanish without notification, and whose tourists are fear­some. The business is on its method to Bremen, a quite clear tip regarding the source fairy tale, however the setup recommends a much more surreal and psychically troubling variation of the familiar postapocalyptic circumstance of Station Eleven and other tales.

No such collection would be total with­out animal tales, though Link’s examples are both from sources aside from Grimm. “The White Cat’s Divorce” most plainly follows its literary source, Countess d’Aulnoy’s “The White Cat”. Instead of a king, however, Link provides us with a comically narcissistic, preposterously rich, and all too familiar dad, who sets outrageous tasks for his 3 children as a sort of commitment test to identify who will be his sole successor. The youngest boy discovers himself stranded in a remote marijuana farm staffed totally by cats, and the white cat of the title ends up being a significantly tutelary figure, as in d’Aulnoy’s initial. “The Lady and the Fox” is a much looser and more changed variation of “Tam Lin”, which fol­lows the life of the goddaughter of a rich and rather decadent family, who throughout the years discovers herself falling for a ghost­like figure in antiquated gown who sometimes goes to the family home and is just seen by her. Both tales integrate a trenchant satirical view of opportunity and class with an event of the disruptive power of magic, and those unanticipated interruptions are a crucial function of what makes a Link story special. White Cat, Black Dog might be the most thematically uni­fied of Link’s collections up until now, however as constantly each story stays a wonderful surprise, leav­ing us where we never ever rather anticipated to be.

This evaluation and more like it in the February 2023 problem of Locus.

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