Owen King’s sparkling debut

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 23:30:00 +0000

I DON'T KNOW WHAT I was expecting from Owen King’s debut novel, Double Feature, but I wasn’t expecting to laugh so hard that my eyebrows hurt. But I did. I laughed that hard. I’m not sure why the impact on my eyebrows was so immediate and intense. Maybe because they’d jump up at certain scenes in the novel and then ride the rising waves shooting from the lower half of my face.

Karen Russell’s vampires have bite

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 17:00:00 +0000

HERE'S THE LAMEST review equation in the world: Musician X + Filmmaker Y =Writer Z. So, forgive me this transgression (I just can’t help myself): Karen Russell is like some weird, perfect blend of singer-songwriter Neko Case and Studio Ghibli mastermind Hayao Miyazaki. Dreamy and gleeful and muscular, Russell, like these other artists, succeeds on her own terms: she’s a swaggering world-builder, a center-tent carnival barker, a wild-eyed curator of all things fantastic. Her half-mad tales give breath to an exuberant chorus of confused souls. And she’s not tied down to any genre. She summons influences as diverse as H.P. Lovecraft and Joy Williams, Shirley Jackson and Michael Chabon, Italo Calvino and Carson McCullers, Mark Richard and Ray Bradbury, and weaves it all — as only a young marvel can — into something wholly new, something majestic and real.
Vampires in the Lemon Grove is Russell’s third book, following debut story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and debut novel Swamplandia!, both widely recognized as stunning inventions. It features eight stories, each shot through with dizzying language, in which we’re introduced to lemon-munching vampires, silkworm-girls, seagull armies, apocalyptic pioneers, ex-presidents reincarnated as horses, the perilous practice of Antarctic tailgating, a massage therapist who inherits the memories of a tortured young veteran, and a scarecrow that haunts a posse of young bullies. Russell’s characters — always somewhere between tender and vicious — are lovingly, carefully rendered. Full of magic and myth, they’re our guides through the strangest and darkest stretches of Russell’s heaven-bright imagination. And they’re funny. Man, are they funny. They whimper and whelp and wail and beg to be danced with.

Salon.com > William Boyle

Owen King’s sparkling debut

Karen Russell’s vampires have bite