When You Crave Some Comforting Strangeness
More than ever before, humans seem to be inundated with stories. They pour out of our screens and social-media feeds, our books, and, of course, ourselves. The urge to create narratives in order to make sense of reality is matched only by the need to escape reality by the same means.
Amid this abundance, fairy tales have found renewed popularity in recent years. Best-selling authors such as Marissa Meyer cleverly recycle the likes of Cinderella and Snow White by hurling them into a science-fictional future. The hit 2010s television show Once Upon a Time remixed just about every fairy-tale character and trope. But what the best updated fairy tales have in common is the way they strike a careful balance between revisionist novelty and faithful takes on the familiar. Go too far one way or the other, and the story is likely to flop with audiences longing for that perfect paradox: comforting strangeness.
Kelly Link, the author of the new story collection White Cat, Black Dog, masterfully twists familiar source material into unexpected, new shapes. She combines everyday banalities with unsettlingly bizarre elements, ultimately showing how hazy the borders between magic and reality are. In doing so, she challenges readers to question the archetypes they take for granted. In her 2000 story “Swans,” for example, Link combines the darker elements of two of the most famous tales—“Cinderella” and “Rumpelstiltskin”—with the elegant horror of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Wild Swans.” In this mash-up, a young princess of magical provenance learns what it costs to retain her humanness in the arbitrarily cruel world of adults. Link complicates the evil-stepmother trope by showing that, in parenting, morality isn’t always black and white.
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At the same time, “Swans” manipulates its source material with precocious flair. Where the Brothers Grimm’s and Andersen’s stories take place strictly in the world of fantasy, Link’s young protagonist, Emma, seems to sense that she exists in a fairy tale, but she has no power to escape this morbid realm. Quotidian details place the story squarely in the real world (the protagonist’s deceased mother, for instance, sewed a quilt adorned with Star Wars characters for one of her children), yet Emma blithely acknowledges that she lives in a palace and has a “fairy godfather.” Link doesn’t go fully meta, but the story gives one the uncanny sensation of blurred lines, of slippage between the known world and the surreal.
Link’s new collection is just as conceptually twisty. Its seven stories draw from a mass of European fairy-tale influences, each stuffed with bewildering detail and brain-popping wonder. In “The White Cat’s Divorce,” based on the 17th-century French tale “The White Cat,” a tycoon’s heirs vie for their father’s love—and his wealth—in mysterious, offbeat ways. Link seems to take pleasure in toying with the loose, internal logic of a fairy tale; the story features, for instance, bipedal, talking felines that cultivate cannabis.
Throughout the book, Link alternates between anachronism and timelessness. But rather than feeling jarring or random, her dreamlike superimposition of fuzzy settings and different eras resolve into a sharper, more vivid image of her characters’ lives. In “The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear,” an inversion of the German legend “The Boy Who Did Not Know Fear,” a modern-day woman swims in a hotel pool while meditating on the meaning of motherhood and reflecting on a book that she loved as a child, about archeologists in the year 4022 trying to decode the artifacts they’ve dug up. Floating on her back, the woman observes that “I was as liberated in time and place and purpose as I had ever been.” Like the woman, Link’s tales feel untethered. Do they take place in the past? The future? Some parallel present? The real world or an imagined one? All or none of the above? If Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell argued that fairy tales bear a universal familiarity, Link seems hell-bent on making them weirdly unfamiliar again—and the tension she creates in doing so makes the stories newly compelling.
Many of today’s more popular fairy-tale retellings—such as Meyer’s take on Disney classics and Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, a lush rendition of Polish folklore—primarily reupholster their source material. As good as they are, their expansions of existing stories feel familiar, like fresh comfort food made of leftover comfort food. Link’s retellings claim a more literary provenance: Angela Carter, Shirley Jackson, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Le Guin’s chilling deconstruction of “Sleeping Beauty” in her short story “The Poacher” is what Link’s work most calls to mind. (Link herself has called it one of her favorite stories.) “The Poacher,” like much of Le Guin’s work, plumbs heavy issues such as gender, class, and consent with deadly earnestness in the tale of a comatose princess whose rescue by a peasant is far from a happily-ever-after. Link probes many of the same themes, but she does so with sly whimsy and lightness of touch. The quiet lyricism of “The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear,” for example, veers into visions of swimming pools full of blood—and that contrast between dreaminess and dread makes the darkness feel even inkier.
That darkness owes a debt to the Brothers Grimm, and some of the best stories in White Cat, Black Dog—“The White Road,” “The Game of Smash and Recovery,” and “Skinder’s Veil”—lean on their bibliography. In these stories, Link really cuts loose, incorporating vampires, a vision of a postapocalypse, and a naturally occurring, druglike fog. Along the way, she distorts subjects such as thespianism and academia in a maze of fun-house mirrors. But where someone like Meyer might pull a fantastical gimmick, relocating Snow White to the moon, for instance, Link’s stories usually take place closer to home. In “Skinder’s Veil,” she follows a group of graduate students who are trying to find themselves, a storyline that would seem utterly realist, even banal, were it not for the unnerving appearances of sex toys, fear-stricken ghosts, and the music of Ariana Grande, all of which seem to serve as talismans. In Link’s stories, the trappings of ancient folklore and myth weave their way through our everyday lives.
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“Fairytales are a very useful kind of storytelling shorthand,” Link told The Guardian in 2015. “You can use fragments of them in ways that add dimension and weight to whatever other kinds of story you’re telling.” Eight years on, she’s still proving this. “Prince Hat Underground,” arguably the best story in White Cat, Black Dog, stars a charming queer couple who frequent a café called Folklore—a downright normal restaurant that’s known for “the perfunctory briskness of its servers, the predictable savor of its eggs Benedict.” But it exists not far from a spa where massage therapists exorcise demons from their patients’ muscles. In Link’s stories, fairy tales are uniquely equipped to bring the mundane and the magical together. She beckons us into her gingerbread house in the cul-de-sac suburbs, hoping to entangle and provoke us. In “The Lady and the Fox,” Link writes that the 14-year-old protagonist has “outgrown fairytales”; meanwhile, she unknowingly populates one. For Link, modern literature can never outgrow the resilience and resonance of the fairy tale. And even if it could, what fun would that be?