Pretty Monsters

Book Description

Critics

• Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link

  It goes without saying, but the greatest thing about fantasy fiction is that one can go anywhere with it, and do anything. So a young man can easily try and dig his girlfriend up and retrieve some poetry he romantically left with her - only to have a ... (read full critics)

  thebookbag published on Wed, 29 Sep 2010

• Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link

  Mixing fantasy, horror, the gothic and the supernatural, the stories of Massachusetts-based Kelly Link play host to a menagerie of untrustworthy wizards, talking corpses, vampiric ghosts and undead babysitters. Against a backdrop of recognisable Amer ... (read full critics)

  guardian.co.uk published on Fri, 24 Sep 2010

1 Review

• 

  This was recommended to me by a friend whose opinion I normally trust on books, but I'm starting to think maybe our taste is only similar before 1950! I didn't care much for this at all. It's a short story collection of strange/spooky/gothic tales. I think it would be very appealing to fans of Angel ... (continue)

  This was recommended to me by a friend whose opinion I normally trust on books, but I'm starting to think maybe our taste is only similar before 1950! I didn't care much for this at all. It's a short story collection of strange/spooky/gothic tales. I think it would be very appealing to fans of Angela Carter and Neil Gaiman but it just wasn't my thing at all.

  Firstly the characters were all teenagers, and not very interesting teenagers at that. Quite a few of the stories were set in made up fantasy type worlds but the people didn't seem real enough or interesting enough to be able to relate to. But rather normal dull ones! The timing was really odd for most of the stories as well, it was like she spent most of the story setting things up and then as soon as something happened and the plot was about to move on the story ended. I think my biggest problem was her style though. It was just so clunky most of the time. It kinda felt like the stories were being written by someone with autism or something. It was just very strange and not in a good way.

  The stories in the book were the Wrong Grave, which seemed kinda a pointless story about a guy digging up his ex-girlfriends grave to find someone else there only to reveal it was his ex-girlfriend she just didn't want to tell him, and ended when she went off to have an adventure. The wizards of perfil was better, kids taken away and meant to work for wizards, but the reveal at the end just felt like a let down. The faery handbag was one of my favourite stories. It was also kinda predictable but it felt the most like an actual folktale rather than something made up (there were no gratutious references to livejournal or google). The specialist's hat was quite a nice ghost story about little girls playing that they were dead. Monster was about annoying boys at summer camp who get eaten by a monster. The monster was definitely the best part, though he was only in it for a bit. The surfer was actually my favourite story, it was the least fantasy based of the story. While it was mostly people waiting in quarantine in a distopian future, and the main character was a teen obsessed with soccer! I still liked it. It was claustrophobic and felt like the most believable of the stories. Perhaps it was because it felt like it was more scifi than fantasy/horror. The constable of Abal was one of the more fantastical tales but I also quite liked it. It felt very much like an Indian or Chinese story that had been changed into a western fairy tale. Pretty monsters I just found terrible. It was terribly predictable, I think I'd figured out the "twist" in 10 pages and the characters were just awful. The cinderella game I also didn't care much for, not exactly new ideas or interesting.

  I think there are a lot of people who'd really like this book. But for me it was very hit or miss. There were a couple stories I enjoyed but overall I found it really awkward. More than anything it just made me want to go back and read nice Victorian prose again. I don't think I'll be reading any more books by Kelly Link.

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Book Details

• Rating:
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• English Books
• eBook 416 Pages
• ISBN-10: 1847678203
• ISBN-13: 9781847678201
• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Pub date: Oct 15, 2009
• Also available as: Hardcover and Others
• In other languages: other languages Libri Italiani

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