Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Starred review from October 29, 2012
There are only eight stories in Russell’s new collection, but as readers of Swamplandia! know, Russell doesn’t work small. She’s a world builder, and the stranger the better. Not that she writes fantasy, exactly: the worlds she creates live within the one we know—but sometimes they operate by different rules. Take “The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979”: Nal, its main character, is your basic dejected 14-year-old boy whose brother gets the girls and whose mother has more or less given up; “Nal was a virgin. He kicked at a wet clump of sand until it exploded.” But in this beach town, the seagulls have secrets. Or consider “The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis,” a story of high school bullying that extends a familiar plot line in eerie and convincing ways. Similarly, “The New Veterans,” in which a middle-aged masseuse works on a young Iraq War vet haunted by his buddy’s death, blurs horror, the genre, with the horror of daily life. Is the masseuse losing her mind? Is the vet? What about those ignoring the war entirely? Perhaps the answers lie in the veteran’s muddy, whole-back tattoo: “Light hops the fence of its design. So many colors go waterfalling down the man’s spine that, at first glance, she can’t make any sense of the picture.” While this story runs a little long, and the otherwise excellent “Proving Up” doesn’t need its final gothic touch, Russell’s great gift—along with her antic imagination—who else would give us a barn full of ex-presidents reincarnated as horses?—is her ability to create whole landscapes and lifetimes of strangeness within the confines of a short story. Agent: The Denise Shannon Literary Agency.

May 27, 2013
In this collection of stories from Russell (Swamplandia!), multiple threads are tied together by pervasive magical realism, with the author’s macabre imagination conjuring malevolent seagulls, karmic scarecrows, and melancholy vampires who sate their thirst by biting into succulent Italian lemons instead of human necks. Among the standouts in the audio edition is Joy Osmanski’s reading of “Reeling for the Empire,” in which young Japanese factory workers take quiet revenge on their employer, who has enslaved them as human silkworms. Osmanski’s soft voice and unhurried manner are perfectly suited to this story; she uses long pauses as she tells of the workers’ struggle to retain their humanity. Equally charming is Robbie Daymond’s narration of “The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis,” about adolescent bullies who come across an oddly familiar scarecrow. Daymond gives each of the four bullies—and their gentle victim—unique voices that are easy to differentiate. A Knopf hardcover.

Starred review from November 15, 2012
A consistently arresting, frequently stunning collection of eight stories. Though Russell enjoyed her breakthrough--both popular and critical--with her debut novel (Swamplandia!, 2011), she had earlier attracted notice with her short stories (St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, 2006). Here, she returns to that format with startling effect, reinforcing the uniqueness of her fiction, employing situations that are implausible, even outlandish, to illuminate the human condition. Or the vampire condition, as she does in the opening title story, where the ostensibly unthreatening narrator comes to term with immortality, love and loss, and his essential nature. Then there's "The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979," about a 14-year-old boy's sexual initiation during a summer in which he is so acutely self-conscious that he barely notices that his town has been invaded by sea gulls, "gulls grouped so thickly that from a distance they looked like snowbanks." Perhaps the most ingenious of this inspired lot is "The New Veterans," with a comparatively realistic setup that finds soldiers who are returning from battle given massages to reduce stress. In one particular relationship, the elaborately tattooed back of a young veteran provides a narrative all its own, one transformed by the narrative process of the massage. The interplay has profound implications for both the masseuse and her initially reluctant patient; both discover that "healing hurts sometimes." The two shortest stories are also the slightest, though both reflect the seemingly boundless imagination of the author. "The Barn at the End of Our Term" finds a seemingly random group of former presidents in denial (at both their loss of power and the fact that they have somehow become horses), and "Dougbert Shackleton's Rules for Antarctic Tailgating" presents the "Food Chain Games" as the ultimate spectator sport. With the concluding "The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis," about a group of teenage bullies and an urban scarecrow, the fiction blurs all distinction between creative whimsy and moral imperative. Even more impressive than Russell's critically acclaimed novel.

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September 15, 2012

The New Yorker's 20 Under 40. Granta's Best Young American Novelists. The National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35. Russell surely has had a stellar career, straight out of the gate. Her new collection echoes the witty lusciousness of her first novel, Pulitzer finalist Swamplandia! (also a New York Times and a No. 1 Indie Next best seller and a New York Times Book Review Top Ten); the title piece features two vampires whose 100-year-old marriage is on the skids because one has developed a fear of flying. A few stories, like those about abandoned children, lose the wit and lusciousness and go all dark.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2012
Russell's electrically original short stories propelled her into the literary limelight, then her first novel, Swamplandia! (2011), was chosen as finalist for the Pulitzer and the first Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. In her third book, she returns to the story form with renewed daring, leading us again into uncharted terrain, though as fantastic as the predicaments she imagines are, the emotions couldn't be truer to life as we usually know it. So even though the troubles of a long-married couple are complicated by the fact that they are vampires, and she can transform herself into a bat while he can only pose as a small, kindly Italian grandfather, their catastrophic heartache is all human. The same holds true for the courage and ingenuity Kitsune summons in confronting the horror of her brutal metamorphosis and enslavement in a Japanese silk mill. Ditto for President Rutherford Hayes when he finds himself reincarnated in the body of a horse. From the grueling Food Chain Games in Antarctica to terror on the prairie in the sod-house era, Russell, in the same vein as Jim Shepard and George Saunders though unique in her outlook, continues her mind-blowing, mythic, macabre, hilarious, and tender inquiry into the profound link between humans and animals, and what separates us.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)