Russell leaves off nearly all these stories in the middle of an action, ending on a freeze frame that leaves us - readers and characters alike - reaching for what will happen next. This story ends, like so many in the collection, on a, not to spoil anything, but surprisingly literal cliffhanger. My wife has no patience for this sort of meditation. I’ve been sitting here so long their falls seem contiguous, close as raindrops. The first paragraph opens flowery, fragrant, and ends with an ironic twist of the lips: This one opens in Sorrento, Italy, on an old vampire sitting alone on a bench. The collection opens with the titular “Vampires in the Lemon Grove,” a story whose threat, if mild compared to some of the later pieces, sets us up for what’s to come.
So her second short story collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, has a lot to live up to - perhaps why this collection sees Russell moving out of the murky Floridian swamps and into what seem to be much darker territories.
What to say about Karen Russell that hasn’t already been said? A brilliant wunderkind, fantastically original with a sparklingly inventive voice, shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 - where Swamplandia! went up against both David Foster Wallace’s posthumous Pale King and Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams in a wild trio that reportedly threw the board into such a tizzy there was no prize for fiction that year.
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