"The Barn at the End of Our Term" concerns the reincarnation of certain U.S. Some of the stories in this collection push further into absurdism.
An old vampire who does not know, anymore, what sort of man or monster he is. A boy in Strong Beach plagued by the coincidence of his transforming adolescent form and an invasion of seagulls. Japanese girls stolen away from their homes and transformed, slowly, into giant silkworms that reel thread for their empire. Here, as before, we have forlorn youth, confused desires, and misplaced monsters. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006) and Swamplandia! (2012 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction). This, and the ideas at play, is what sticks around.In Vampires in the Lemon Grove, her third book and second collection of short stories, Karen Russell does not deviate very far from those characters and themes familiar to readers of her previous work, St. But don’t run screaming out of the sunlight: Russell knows to ground her fancies with human fragility. Take the title story: It’s about a vampire who looks like a grandpa, sucks on lemons to curb his bloodlust and walks everywhere because he’s afraid to fly.
Things get dark, unflaggingly so at times, but the whimsical conceits that Russell plays with can overwhelm the thrust of the tales. Though this batch of stories is another testament to the fecundity of Russell’s imagination, the weakness of her previous volumes stands here, too. After discovering birds that hide humans’ important artifacts and thwart their promising futures in “The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979,” an awkward boy attempts to reverse his fortunes.
Four young bullies are haunted by their transgressions in “The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis,” as a onetime classmate revisits them in the form of a scarecrow. Presidents are reincarnated as horses and dispatched to the same stable their egos arrive intact. In “The Barn at the End of Our Term,” several dead U.S. In pieces that range from diverting frolics to ominous, cautionary tales, the author uplifts underdogs and rattles the willfully ignorant. Karen Russell, a young fiction phenom whose debut novel, Swamplandia!, was shortlisted for the Pulitzer last year, makes it all clear in her second story collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove. Okay, the circumstances may be atypical, but the lesson remains.
No matter how far we drift into the Antarctic to cheer for indifferent crustaceans or how long we stay away from the girls reeling silk from their mutant bellies, we can’t escape our pasts.
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