Interview: Kelly Link, author

Published on Sunday 18 October 2009 12:19

REAL life has a habit of muscling its way into Kelly Link's remarkable and surreal short stories. Her third collection, Pretty Monsters, is a fizzing alchemy of ghost stories, fairytales, fantasy, pulp, and horror that perfectly justifies the description of Link as Borges-meet-Buffy.

Her stories are very odd, and very funny. They may feature a handbag with a village inside it, a boy who digs up his girlfriend's grave to retrieve a poem, and a kickass TV show set in a library, but all of this happens in the America we know from TV shows, comics and books. Link's is a world equally inspired by HP Lovecraft, Star Wars and the kind of smart-talking, sexy vampires we instantly recognise from the likes of True Blood.

When I speak to her, real life muscles its way into our conversation too. Before we talk about her stories, and the praise they have garnered from the likes of Michael Chabon, Audrey Niffenegger and Neil Gaiman, she tells me about her daughter. At the moment, Link and her husband, a Scotsman with whom she runs a publishing house, Small Beer Press, are living in Boston, two hours away from their home in Northampton, Massachusetts. They need to be near the hospital because their first baby was born prematurely at just 25 weeks in February and has been in an incubator ever since. They may not get to take Ursula home until next spring, when her lungs will be stronger.

Link says that when she first started visiting her daughter, she felt a bit like a ghost herself. "I was so focused on seeing her and yet the things we could do were so limited," she says. "We couldn't hold her for a long time. We couldn't really take care of her, the nurses had to do that. So there was a feeling of frustration and an intense longing. Very ghost-like."

As Link kept returning month after month to the neonatal unit with an armful of picture books, the writer in her started thinking about ghost stories again. "It's a very eerie environment," she says. "The lights are very low and the babies are so small in their lit-up incubators. Everyone is very quiet. I started wondering what kind of ghost story I might tell there. It's a very charged place. I thought if I was going to die, I wouldn't want to keep doing the same thing that I'd been repeating five times a day: taking the elevator up to the neonatal intensive care unit, signing in, washing my hands and then walking into this dark ward. It's not a place where I would want to spend eternity."

She's not writing her ghost story yet – it's still too close – but when she does, expect it to be dark, weird, maybe even funny.

Link has something of a cult status in America. Her stories have appeared in McSweeney's and various anthologies and then there is Small Beer Press, which publishes "weird stuff", and the low-budget zine she and her husband have been producing for years called Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. In the UK, we're only now starting to cotton on to Link's smart, streetwise voice.

"I want the stories to read like a friend telling you a ghost story," she says. "Like someone you're comfortable with telling you something very strange."

This year, Sarah Waters included one of Link's Pretty Monsters tales, The Specialist's Hat – about an undead babysitter – in her top ten ghost stories of all time. The collection was aimed at young adults in the US. "I don't think Harry Potter will be moving over any time soon," Link jokes, and she's got a point. Her stories are way too weird for Hogwarts.

Link studied for a year in St Andrews and while she was in Scotland decided to enter a travel competition. In answer to the question "Why do you want to go around the world?" she wrote a single line: "You can't go through it", which says quite a lot about her prose style.

Link won the prize, travelled the world, ended up in Massachusetts, and now she's got her eye on Scotland again. "We would love to come back and live there in the next couple of years," she says, before setting off for the hospital again. "Last time we walked the West Highland Way and parts of that would be fantastic to set a ghost story. I've been thinking about it ever since."

Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link is published on Hallowe'en, 31 October, Canongate, 12.99

This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 18 October 2009