More often than not, Russell rebuts any such accusation with a deft, whimsical gesture, a touch of paradoxically grounding pixie humour. Are these things really happening? Are they the surface of an object, a genuine fictional 'world', something solid with which the reader can engage? Or only a dance of words and their possibilities?

In 'The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach', the titular birds draw 'a white caul over the marina', warping 'people's futures into some new and terrible shapes' while Nal's mother rumbles around her house 'like its last moving part', and the 'melted aluminium' of the sea ripples in front of him. Their inner worlds are inseparable from their outer worlds – indeed, all that's left to make a distinction between the two is the author's Hipstamatic imagery and liquid prose.Ĭlyde the vampire describes 'veiled mother-in-laws like violet spiders'. From the bullying schoolboys of 'The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis' to the traumatised soldier of 'The New Veterans', characters are beholden to fathers, mothers, siblings, partners, employers, examiners, bureaucracies to vague and often absent principles of culture or governance. She's stunned by the colour of the silk she produces, but the 'stench of a bad and sickening future' fills the room where she lives and works. In 'Reeling for the Empire', Kitsune, a dutiful Japanese daughter from some biopunk universe parallel to our own, is turned into a human silkworm. Will the Inspector ever arrive to validate their efforts? Or is he only some desperate superego formation, a paranoid delusion of the Plains? Driven by the need to demonstrate their worth in the face of vague, bizarre but rigid systems, the hunger-maddened settlers of 'Proving Up' accept blame for the unimprovable condition of their lives. Nal, the early-teen protagonist of 'The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach', can't remember 'the last time he acted without reservation on a single desire'. But none of her monsters would be complete without a comical balancing sense of responsibility.

The quality of being (or not quite being) monstrous proves central to most of the short stories in this, Karen Russell's second collection. Member of a transitional generation – not quite a monster, not quite a human being – he can be neither what he was nor what he aspires to be.Ĭlyde is only a case in point. He no longer needs to bite, but he's forgotten how to fly. 'Instead of stalking prostitutes,' he records, stunned by his own daring, 'I went on long bicycle rides.' But he still describes his early years 'on the blood' like a junkie: someone always in recovery. He takes to sucking lemons instead of people. With the help of his lover, Clyde the vampire discovers himself to be a pure social construct, trapped in a culturally transmitted behaviour pattern.

Proving up karen russell summary