I feel bad saying this about a writer who was nice to me when they signed copies of their book for me, but after three short story collections, I simply do not get the hype surrounding Karen Russell. I recall enjoying her debut novel Swamplandia, but the three collections she has put out, all lauded and heaped with praise have failed to impress me. They always seem well thought out and put together competently and look good on a sentence by sentence basis, but the ideas have always seemed very shoddy to me, either not well thought out or too on the nose in its use of genre as a means of social commentary, so something that should be interesting on its own becomes a little too didactic for me, a real problem for some of the stories in this collection. While I found a lot of these stories lacking the wow factor, something not helped by their sometimes languorous running time, but I did not hate any of them and I liked a few. It opens up rather brilliantly with “The Prospectors” a story of two gold-digging young women who take the wrong ski lift up a mountain and wind up at a party of ghostly men who died in an avalanche. It dolls out the proper amount of sympathy for both the grifting duo and ghostly guests and maintains a palpable sense of dread while slyly commenting on the fraught nature of male-female interactions. Like “The Graveless doll of Eric Mutis” in her previous collection, this is the book’s lone standout, followed by the clunky yet entertaining title story. But most, like “Bog Girl: A Romance”, The Tornado Auction and especially “The Bad Graft” (where a woman becomes something like an endangered Joshua tree) have big ideas but never rein them in to create something interesting.
Rating: 4/5
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