Magic for Beginners Review

Kelly Link’s 2006 Locus Award winning short

story collection is a blend of slipstream fiction

combining elements of fantasy, science fiction, and

horror in ways that are surprising, fun, and at times

unsettling. You won’t find any brain eating zombies in

Link’s world, instead they endless browse convenience

stores before returning to their mysterious own community; her aliens don’t abduct

people from saucer shaped crafts, instead they’re your wife, who is cloning herself in the

attic. In one story, she even manages to make bunny rabbits foreboding. Her stories are

unpredictable and dream like, transforming even the most familiar genre elements into

something new. She even manages to present the reader with few new ones—creating a

mythology all her own.

In “The Faery Handbag” for example, fairies don’t live in some banal enchanted

forest, but in a black, furry purse belonging to Genevieve’s Grandmother Zofia. The old

woman claims to be from a country that no longer exists (Balderziwurlekistan), cheats at

scrabble, and steals books from the public library. The true name of the bag translates

sounds something like orzipanikanikcz, which translates to “bag of skin where the world

lives.” If you open the bag the wrong way for instance, a terrible beast that lives within

will swallow you up. Sometimes Grandmother Zofia even slips it popcorn to keep it

complacent. Open it the other way and you’ll be sucked inside.

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Throughout the piece, you’re not quite sure whether the enigmatic Zofia is full of

old-world whimsy or truly the keeper of trans dimensional fashions—until Genevieve’s

boyfriend Jake is sucked inside that is. More importantly, you’re having so much fun

while reading that it doesn’t really matter. Link turns the concept of the fairy ring into

something contemporary, and the story serves as an excellent introduction to the kooky

alternate universes she creates with this collection.

Link reintroduces the readers to zombies in her second story in the collection,

“The Hortlak.” Instead of stumbling around searching for brains to eat, they peruse an

aptly named convenience store called The All-Night. The protagonist of the story, Eric,

lives and works there with his pajama clad manager Batu, who “had evolved past the

need for more than two or three hours’ sleep.” At night, the zombies stumble up from a

mysterious community within the adjacent Ausible Canyon, always browsing for wares,

but never buying anything. One of the few non-zombie customers is a woman named

Charley, who works at an animal shelter. Eric dreams of escaping his life at The All-

Night with her in her truck, which is haunted with the ghosts of the dogs she puts down at

the shelter she works at.

This is one of the more dream-like pieces within the collection, and the

convenience store serves as a surreal anchor for quirky characters that come and go

throughout the piece. You want to root for Eric to escape his self imposed purgatory, but

in a world full of nothing but zombies and Canadians who comes into the store to barter

for goods, where is he supposed to go?

In the short, question and answer story “The Cannon,” Link treats the reader with

a piece about military weaponry and the odd-goings on that surround it. It has many

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names for example, details its own childhood, and serves as a place for couples to

copulate. It’s a fun little palette cleanser she’s snuck between the longer pieces.

One of these would be “Stone Animals,” which is definitely one of the more

spooky and engrossing pieces in Magic for Beginners. It tells the story of Henry, his

pregnant wife Catherine, and their two children struggling to adjust to their new life in

the country. While Henry tries to finish up with his job in the city, his wife struggles with

the details of her previous affair, the haunting of various appliances within the house, and

the besiegement of a rabbit army that’s overtaking their lawn. Catherine becomes

neurotic, repeatedly painting everything inside the house so that “everything will go back

to normal and stop being haunted.” The two children become fascinated with the rabbits

and with the idea that they can’t use certain haunted items, eventually becoming

convinced that even rooms that are possessed with malefic energies. The piece is one of

the strongest in the collection, and you’ll never look at a rabbit the same way after

reading it.

Keeping with the animal theme, “Catskin” tells the story of a dying witch’s son

avenging her murder by a fellow witch. The boy, named Small, teams up with one of the

witch’s familiars (literally named The Witch’s Revenge) to hunt down the offending spell

caster. Wearing a fake cat suit made from the pelts of dozens of deceased felines, the

adventure of Small and The Witch’s Revenge is one part “The Old Woman in the Shoe,”

one part “Hansel and Gretel,” and another part The Wizard of Oz on some heavy duty

painkillers.

Link slides back to realism with her story “Zombie Contingency Plans,” which

actually has nothing to do with the undead or the previously mentioned convenience store

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browsers. It’s about a guy named Soap who’s crashed the party of a young woman whose

parents are traveling abroad. An ex-con and oil painting thief, Soap recounts the story of

how he and his friends almost pulled of an art heist. It’s a departure from the tone of the

other stories, but strange enough that you feel like the Link’s monsters still inhabit the

world presented if only out of view for a few pages.

She quickly returns to the realm of the supernatural with the following story, “The

Great Divorce,” in which a man struggles with his relationship with his wife and

stepchildren—all of who are ghosts. Using a medium, Alan and his spectral spouse fight

it out and try to see if a marriage can work with one of them six feet under. The piece

isn’t as enjoyable as some of the others in the collection though because, while the

supernatural element is intriguing, the ghosts feel removed from the protagonist and

therefore less engaging. It’s only through the medium that they can communicate, and the

stakes of the relationship don’t feel terribly high—instead feeling DOA.

“Magic for Beginners,” the piece that aptly represents this collection, tells the

story of Jeremy Mars, who along with his friends and librarian mother and novelist father

are obsessed with a mysterious television show called The Library. The show is a pirate

program that mysteriously appeared out of nowhere, is written by no one, and stars actors

that nobody can place. “It’s shown up once or twice on most network channels, but

usually it’s on the kind of channels that Jeremy thinks of as ghost channels. The ones that

are just static, unless you’re paying for several hundred channels of cable…[it has] no

regular schedule, no credits, and sometimes not even dialogue.” Things get even stranger

when Jeremy begins getting phone calls from a character on the show from an abandoned

telephone booth he’s recently inherited.

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The piece feels fresh and mysterious but without foreboding. The Library as a

program is inventive and the characters within it engaging. This is Link’s strongest

piece, and any reader would be hard pressed to change the channel on this one.

The collection ends with Link’s oddest story, “Lull,” which feels like it’s trying to

tell several stories in one. There is a sub plot in which an over-the-phone service tells a

group of poker playing men a story about time working itself backwards as well as a tale

about a cheerleader making with Satan in a closet. The narrative also focuses on one of

the poker player’s wife, who is multiplying herself with alien technology in attic. It feels

scattered, and throughout the piece, it’s difficult to find any emotional grounding to

engage you in the narrative. It’s conceptually intriguing, but not the endnote to the

collection that you’re looking for after the much stronger piece that came before it.

That being said, Magic for Beginners is still a must read for fans of fantasy,

science fiction, horror…or anyone with an appreciation for the strange and unusual.

While some of the stories do some conceptual brain scratching, most of them are

successful and inventive forays into Link’s own signature brand of surreal imagination.

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