Get in Trouble: Stories
by Kelly Link
Kelly Link’s stories feel like waking dreams—witty, eerie, and emotionally precise even when the world turns strange. This collection blends fantasy, horror, and realism, often slipping between them mid-scene as if the boundaries were polite suggestions. Link is a master of tone: she can be deadpan funny and deeply unsettling in the same paragraph. Many stories explore adolescence and adulthood as haunted states, full of longing, confusion, and half-remembered rules. The characters often feel slightly out of phase with their lives, which makes the supernatural feel like an extension of ordinary alienation. Link’s plots are sly and unpredictable, less interested in tidy resolution than in resonance. The writing rewards rereading—details that seemed incidental begin to glow with meaning. There’s also tenderness beneath the weirdness; these stories care about people, even when they’re lost in impossible situations. The collection’s title becomes a quiet thesis: trouble as curiosity, trouble as transformation. It’s inventive without being cold, playful without being slight. A brilliant showcase of what short fiction can do when it refuses to behave.
