When I set out to write this article, one of the first things I did was head over to Wikipedia (say sorry) for a brief rundown of her personal biography. From there, I could go searching through other online resources to gain a greater picture of such things as what books she liked to read growing up? What were her favorite stories, in other words? What kind of shaping influence did these works of fiction have on the development of her own artistic Imagination? How did all this effect the way in which she told her own stories? Where did the ideas for her penchant for playing with narrative conventions come or stem from? Why did she decide to let this be one of the defining features of her stories? What sort of general outline of her life would help us to gain an understanding of her growth as an artist? These are all the sort of questions and background details that any critic worthy of the name should want to have at his disposal when it comes to getting as clear a picture as they can on whichever artist or artwork that comes in for a viewing under the microscope. So of course, she gives me nothing to work with. I've been unable to glean much information about either Link's life, the books she liked, or how it all went together to shape the writer she's become. I'm left having to critique from a blank slate.
That's sort of the last thing I was expecting to happen here. I can also appreciate how this sort of plays havoc with the goals I've set up for this site to be able to enjoy a good laugh at my expense. It also means that a lot of the focus for this article will have to remain on the artistry, almost at the total exclusion of the author. I can't help wondering if Ms. Link might have preferred things this way. Whatever the case, it means that best place left for me to start with in practice is with a description of what kind of generic author she is. It helps to bear in mind that this marks the first time I've read any of Link's work, yet the good news about that is I was able to make an after-the-fact smart choice about it. I stumbled upon just the right sort of introductory text that was of such a quality as to serve as the perfect gateway introduction to the kind of stories Kelly Link likes to tell. The type of story where the contents of the narrative go a long way toward giving the reader as full a picture as possible of what sort of writer and tale they've got on their hands. With this in mind, the first solid thing I can tell you about Link is that her writings belong to a very specific coterie, or group of writings and authors.The one bit of biographical trivia I was able to dig up was that she was born in 1969. That's an important date, because it signals her as belonging to either somewhere in the middle or in the immediate aftermath of what was then a New Wave within all the major genres of Popular fiction. This was back during a time when a lot creative talents in the fields of Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror were busy hammering out all the defining traits by which we know them today. It was thanks to the efforts of writers like Harlan Ellison or Shirley Jackson that we begin to see the formation of the current tropes that still define the popular genres as we have them (for the moment, anyway). The thing to keep in mind is that a lot of what now seems commonplace to us was (during the time period in which Link was born, and writers like Ellison and Ursula Le Guinn busy crafting a lot of it) brand new and astonishing in an era before the likes of Star Trek: TNG or Alex Proyas' Dark City. This was the period of creative fermentation when the basic contours of the Popular Fiction began to take their final shape.It was a moment of collective realization and creative potential for the Fantastic genres, and the artists who became aware of this possibility all began to stretch the legs of their artistic capabilities. It's how we got films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, or novels like I Am Legend, or Our Lady of Darkness. Even a book like Salem's Lot has a good claim as both a groundbreaker and a trendsetter. When Stephen King published his novel of a supernatural evil encroaching on a small New England town (no spoilers here!), it may not have been original in the strictest sense of the term, and even the author would be the first to admit that. There had been various attempts at revitalizing, or breathing new life into one particular and long familiar type of monster in the Horror genre. Richard Matheson can be spoken of as having beaten King to the punch twice already by the time the Lot hit the retail shelves. The first time was the aforementioned Legend text. The other came in the form of a somewhat obscure, yet still remembered ABC TV Movie of the Week. It was called The Night Stalker, and was broadcast way back in January of 1972. It featured the Old Man from A Christmas Story as he went up against an otherworldly creature of the night on the streets of Las Vegas (again, no spoilers!). The point however, is that while these efforts may count as the true trendsetters, it was King's work that caught the pop culture imagination in a big way. It was books like his that helped the genres all move forward.
There's perhaps more than a certain amount of unfairness involved there when an artist like Matheson gets lost in the shadows cast by King's later achievement. At the same time, the irony of how things shaped out is that it provides a good look into what is able to grab the audience's attention enough to the point where their collective, shared enthusiasm is enough to turn both an artwork and its author into icons of pop culture. It's what happened to King, and while Matheson has thankfully never been fully neglected, there is a sense that his own efforts have come to be regarded as stories that walked so that efforts of writers like King could run. It may not be fair in the strictest sense, yet it's what the audience has decreed. The point of all this passing trivia is to give a sense of the literary melting pot into which Kelly was born, and which she later went on to participate in. It makes sense to label this moment of creativity and artistic growth as the formation of a kind of movement, and it's one I've talked about before. In my opinion, Kelly Link belongs to a group of authors known as the New Wave Fabulists.The closest anyone has ever come to a good definition of the writers who comprise this informal literary collective, and the type of stories they have to tell comes from the the mind of American Gothic writer Peter Straub. While he can't give us a complete an idea of New Wave Fabulism, he does make a crucial first tentative step when he explains, "It would be easy but misleading to account for this in evolutionary terms. That is, it is not really accurate to say that over the past two decades the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror have been, unnoticed by the wider literary culture, transforming themselves generation by generation and through the work of each generation’s most adventurous practitioners into something all but unrecognizable, hence barely classifiable at all except as literature. Even evolution doesn’t work that way. The above process did take place, and it was completely overlooked by the wider literary culture but it did not happen smoothly, and the kind of post-transformation fictions represented here owe more than half of their DNA and much of their underlying musculature to their original genre sources. Contemporary, more faithful versions of those sources are to be found all over the place, especially in movie theaters and the genre shelves at Barnes & Noble."Gene Wolfe, who is necessary to this volume, was producing fiction of immense, Nabokovian rigor and complexity thirty years ago, alongside plenty of colleagues who were satisfied to work within the genre’s familiar templates. Now, writers like Nalo Hopkinson, John Kessell, and Patrick O’Leary, for all of whom Gene Wolfe is likely to be what Gary K. Wolf calls a “touchstone,” are still publishing shorter fiction in magazines like Asimov’s and Fantasy and Science Fiction, and so is Kelly Link. (Jonathan Carroll, Jonathan Lethem, Elizabeth Hand, John Crowley, and China Miéville seldom write short fiction, and we are are fortunate to have stories from them.) Strictly on grounds of artistic achievement, these writers should all along have been welcome in thoughtful literary outlets (web)". An explanation that gets us closer to a definition of New Wave Fabulism is to claim that all it amounts to is what happens when any author comes up with the bright idea of fusing the techniques of any of the popular genres with the styles, vocabulary, settings, and vernacular of so-called Realist fiction. This means that a proper label for this kind of story is to claim that it is one of technique, more than it is anything else. It's a genre story told in a style or fashion of contemporary "Literate" fiction.
In other words, all New Wave Fabulism really seems to be is any effort at a story of Horror, Science Fiction, or Fantasy that attempts to wed the generic tropes and templates associated with all three of the narrative kinds listed above with the level of novelistic sophistication that you might find in the pages of a periodicals such as The New Yorker. In other words, it's taking the basic setup or imaginative scenario that you might find in the works of someone like John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, John Updike, or Edith Wharton, and give it all a fantastical twist. To give an example of how this applied technique could shape the contours of a Fabulist narrative, Stephen King once wrote a short story called "Graduation Afternoon". Everything about the piece until the last page or two puts the reader in mind of one of the author's more slice-of-life, Stand By Me type or oriented narratives. Those stories where it seems like King has set aside things going bump in the night for a moment to focus on the type of story that could happen in a more realistic setting. Then the denouement arrives, and the nature of everything we've just read up to that point gets reshaped as the fantastical nature of the story and its characters begins to become apparent as we reach the finish line.
This is an illustration of the New Wave technique in its shorter forms. An even better example of what this type of story amounts to is the idea of an ordinary suburban protagonist going out to play in his or her backyard, and discovering that somehow their house is located somewhere near the foot of Homer's Mount Olympus. That's perhaps the closest I can ever get to a definition of New Wave Fabulism. It's the type of story with a vested interest in trying to bring the realm of the old gods and archetypes down to mingle and mix in with our modern settings and situations. Another term that might apply to this type of fiction is what's known as Urban Fantasy of various varieties. At least it grants a further step closer to the type of stories that authors like Kelly Link tell for a living. In fact, the idea of fantastic happenings in the suburbs is a very good description of the plot of her story, "Magic for Beginners".