BookBrowse Reviews Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu

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A collection of speculative short stories exploring alternate realities and everyday horrors.

Kim Fu has penned two novels and a collection of poems and earned a slew of accolades in the process. Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is her first short story collection and an effortless merger of genres — the narrative constructs of fiction are present, but they're warped by fantastical elements and dramatic and imaginative expressions more common to poetry.

It's a versatile collection that shows the author's range. In "Liddy, First to Fly," a tween girl named Liddy suddenly sprouts wings on her ankles. She and her friends try to keep this a secret from their parents as the wings grow and flourish and she begins her fledgling attempts at flying. Elements of the supernatural as a metaphor for puberty in girls is a well-worn concept; but Fu's deft plotting and clever analysis of the situations she creates for her characters make something that might be cliché feel new and dynamic. Near the end of the story, the girls are discovered by their mothers as Liddy is trying to use her wings to soar off a cliff. As Liddy leaps and disappears over the cliff, one of her friends narrates her dreadful understanding that the attempt at flight was not a success:

I knew because all of the mothers were here. If it had been one adult, the magic could have lasted. One adult can be lured into pretend, can taste the tea in our toy cup, hear the voice on the toy phone. One adult could have seen what we saw and carried it quietly within her forever. But not four.

The presence of the adults drains the magic from the moment, leaving the girls grounded in reality.

The ominously atmospheric "Sandman" revolves around an insomniac named Kelly who is visited by the titular mythical being (see Beyond the Book). The Sandman arrives as a cloaked figure in the night and climbs on top of her in bed. Sand flows from his dark hole of a face into every part of her body: "She felt the grains coursing down her throat, entering a cavity she hadn't known was there, a cathedral emptiness where her organs should have been." Afterwards, she sleeps peacefully. In the days that follow, Kelly longs for the Sandman to return. Her eagerness to re-experience this phenomenon vividly captures the true despair that often accompanies insomnia. The eroticism of these encounters amplifies Kelly's tortured relationship with sleep — it is a fathomless well of desire for something that others take for granted. And like many desires, the greater her longing, the less likely she is to ever feel fulfilled.

"Twenty Hours" features what is perhaps the most clever conceit in the collection, introduced by an indelible first line: "After I killed my wife, I had twenty hours before her new body finished printing downstairs." In the world of this story, wealthy people buy 3D printers that allow them to print a replacement body for themselves if they die in an accident. However, the couple in the story have killed each other repeatedly, just for the thrill. In the 20 hours it takes for his wife's new body to print, the narrator revels in his freedom and solitude by eating McDonald's, which his wife finds "disgusting," and watching pornography at full volume. But in the end, it's revealed that it is not the solitude that compels the narrator to enact this strange little drama, but the ability to be someone else for a moment, and to experience the joy of his wife's return. He explains:

I want her to come back. I want to sit shivering on the cold concrete floor of our unfinished basement, the washing machine against my back, a widowed wreck, boredom and disdain and resentment drained away as after a medieval bloodletting, knowing who I'd be without her, full of new things to tell her, knowing she's the only person who will understand.

Some seasoned readers of speculative short fiction may feel that Fu isn't breaking a lot of new ground. She relies heavily on tropes, even if she is subverting them. But the ingenuity of each story's world and the author's stylized language — what one might call grotesque poetry — are twin engines that propel the reader through the darker and more absurd recesses of Fu's imagination. The title promises something monstrous and she delivers.

This review first ran in the February 16, 2022 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.

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