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Cover of Get in Trouble

Get in Trouble

Kelly Link

368 pages

A darkly playful plunge into a world where suburban anxieties and teenage sleepovers collide with ghosts, superheroes, and the uncanny.

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What it feels like

Reading this collection feels like stepping into a familiar room only to realize the furniture is floating and the shadows are breathing. The pace is steady, allowing you to fully marinate in the eerie, dreamlike atmosphere of each distinct world. The narration is darkly playful and wry, treating animatronic boyfriends and pocket universes with the same casual acceptance as a trip to the grocery store. Yet beneath the surreal trappings and sly humor lies a deep, empathetic well of emotion, exploring the loneliness, frailty, and hidden strengths of ordinary people. It is a masterclass in slipstream fiction that will delight readers who crave the weird, the wondrous, and the profoundly human, leaving a lingering sense of beautiful disorientation long after the final page.

Mood
  • dreamlike
  • eerie
  • unsettling
  • wondrous
Tone
  • darkly playful
  • wry
  • empathetic
  • sly
  • uncanny
Pace
steady
Themes
the awkwardness of adolescence · human frailty and hidden strengths · the intrusion of the magical · loneliness and longing · the uncanny in the everyday
The writing
Deceptively casual and conversational, the sentences effortlessly weave mundane suburban details with startling, surreal imagery.
The arc
The journey shifts from disorienting wonder at bizarre premises to a profound, lingering ache for the very human vulnerabilities at their core.
Who it's for
Fans of slipstream and weird fiction who delight in stories where the fantastical is treated as mundane and the mundane feels utterly strange.
Content notes
  • mild body horror
  • substance use
  • grief
  • teenage angst

About the book

SHE HAS BEEN HAILED BY MICHAEL CHABON as "the most darkly playful voice in American fiction" and by Neil Gaiman as "a national treasure." Now Kelly Link's eagerly awaited new collection--her first for adult readers in a decade--proves indelibly that this bewitchingly original writer is among the finest we have.

Link has won an ardent following for her ability, with each new short story, to take readers deeply into an unforgettable, brilliantly constructed fictional universe. The nine exquisite examples in this collection show her in full command of her formidable powers. In "The Summer People," a young girl in rural North Carolina serves as uneasy caretaker to the mysterious, never-quite-glimpsed visitors who inhabit the cottage behind her house. In "I Can See Right Through You," a middle-aged movie star makes a disturbing trip to the Florida swamp where his former on- and off-screen love interest is shooting a ghost-hunting reality show. In "The New Boyfriend," a suburban slumber party takes an unusual turn, and a teenage friendship is tested, when the spoiled birthday girl opens her big present: a life-sized animated doll.

Hurricanes, astronauts, evil twins, bootleggers, Ouija boards, iguanas, The Wizard of Oz, superheroes, the Pyramids...These are just some of the talismans of an imagination as capacious and as full of wonder as that of any writer today. But as fantastical as these stories can be, they are always grounded by sly humor and an innate generosity of feeling for the frailty--and the hidden strengths--of human beings. In Get in Trouble, this one-of-a-kind talent expands the boundaries of what short fiction can do.

This description comes from the publisher.

Description from Open Library.

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