Get in Trouble

What do you call what Kelly Link does? She takes a story that at first seems to follow the usual rules of realism, and turns it slightly—and then not so slightly—toward the strange, the magical, the fantastic. Or she begins with the strange, but then reveals its all-too-human banality. In the stories I love best in her new collection (her first for adults in ten years), the tension between the strange and the real gives off a cold, uncanny shiver: the resort-town "summer people" a smart townie girl takes care of turn out, among other things, not to be people at all; a teen's creepy envy for her best friend's boyfriend is all the more unsettling because the boyfriend is a robot. Brrrr. Yum.