By Megan Thomas
This eclectic collection of short stories by Karen Russell provided everything I want from an anthology (even the things I don’t actually want, but definitely need – like open endings). Her completely bizarre but totally transfixing use of magical realism makes every story feel like you’ve just consumed a full blown saga within a tiny fraction of the time.
I like to imagine short story writers in a room overflowing with sticky notes covered in words, from which they have to select only a few in order to tell the story. Russell has plucked out the distilled core of every story and given the reader the task of filling in their own additional sticky notes. It is a joy to do – especially when she’s arguably picked the weirdest ones for us to work with.
Enough with that metaphor and onto the stories themselves (which are, admittedly, one perversely extended metaphor after another). I don’t have the space to talk about all of them, and I do recommend the collection as a whole, but let’s focus on my favourites.
As is so often the case (maybe it’s psychological), my favourite story was the collection’s namesake – Orange World. In this story, a woman, desperate to have a healthy child, agrees to breastfeed the devil to ensure this for her child. Soon, she realises there’s a whole network of women being manipulated by this devil and that he is not quite who they think he is.
Another story I thoroughly enjoyed was Bog Girl: A Romance, which told the story of a teenaged boy who falls in love with a two thousand year old girl that he found in a mass of peat in a Northern European bog (which caused her to remain a girl for this period of time). The image is so gross… in the best possible way, showing just how unusual yet effective Russell’s descriptions are.
From hotels inhabited by its builders to Joshua trees that graft when touched by a human, there is no way you’ll find these stories mulching into each other, which can sometimes happen (and be off putting) with a short story collection. You could read this in one sitting yet feel you’ve just consumed eight novels.
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