I think I said this in my
review for Karen Russell’s first collection of stories, St. Lucy’s Home for
Girls Raised By Wolves, and it applies to her new collection, Vampires in the
Lemon Grove, as well”: Russell, who possess an amazing creativity and
imagination, has ideas that are simply to big for the short story form. They
are very high concept and breathtaking in how inventive they are, but they just
leave me wanting to see these ideas pasted on a bigger canvas. With stories
like “Reeling for the Empire” about kidnapped women who are turned into
silkworms, and “Dougbert Shackleton’s Rules for Antarctic Tailgating”, about
boat racing in the Antarctic, just beg to be turned into novels. Not only are
they great ideas, but to really grab your attention, we need to exist for a
while within these finely constructed rules to fully understand them. The
stories Russell writes are merely set-ups to something we’d rather be reading.
But having said that, this collection does have some of her best stories to
date. Like the title story, about a vampire couple living in an Italian lemon
grove who survive on the lemons grown there that is a heartbreaking fable of
love winding down. “The Barn at the End of Our Term”, about the souls of
presidents being transported to the bodies of farm animals on this particular
farm, is actually pretty funny and not as stupid as it sounds. The gem of this
collection has to be the final story, “The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis”, where
a quartet of inner city kids find a doll that resembles a kid they bullied
mercilessly. With echoes of the underrated TV movie Dark Night of the
Scarecrow, it is harrowing tale of guilt and redemption. Russell is one of our
most talented writers, and if when she finds a balance between the short story
and the novel, she will be unstoppable.
Rating: 4/5
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