“Awake, she jerked her head from the pillow as a June bug travelled the outer coil of her upper ear, tender as a lover. She dreamed they moved under her skin, in her bloodstream, riding the current of her heartbeat like river rapids.”
–p. 144, “June Bugs,” Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century: Stories by Kim Fu. Coach House Books, 2022.
Frances Boyle reviews Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, Coach House Books, 2022
Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is Kim Fu’s third book of fiction, after For Today I Am a Boy, her ambitious and award-winning debut novel, and The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, a hybrid novel in stories. Both were essentially realist fiction, although formally innovative. Lesser Known Monsters is more evidently a collection of short stories. The stories are not linked, but the deep strangeness that Fu pairs with a matter-of-factness and ground-level realism are the common elements that hold the book together, making it a rich and engaging read. The “monsters” of the title could be us, contemporary life twisted just a few degrees off true.
Fu uses an impressive range of points of view and voices. There are stories from the perspective of childhood and burgeoning adolescence, stories of long marriages, failed marriages and ones that we come to realize are doomed from the start. Stories both of loneliness and of cloying intimacy. Some have first person narrators, others third person, and one appears as a transcript of a voice recording.
But the most extraordinary aspects of Lesser Known Monsters are the worlds Fu opens us up to. With few exceptions, these stories all feature surreal, fantastical or futuristic elements. But Fu never lets the reader lose contact with the humanity of her characters and the world they live in. We are situated in malls that are strikingly similar to our own, in the head of a performer in an eerily kinky cabaret show cum trust exercise, or sharing space in a playground where there is “a broken picnic table in the patch of grass between the parking lot and the basketball court.”
Several of the stories might at first glance appear to be speculative-tinged variations on familiar tropes. In “Liddy, First to Fly,” pre-adolescents face the mysteries of puberty where young bodies change unexpectedly (here, the titular young woman sprouts wings on her ankles). In “Twenty Hours,” the protagonist and his wife seek to refresh their long, somewhat tired relationship – by murdering each other, with the knowledge that technology they’ve purchased will seamlessly regenerate the spouse’s body, memories and personality. “#ClimbingNation” explores the ersatz intimacies engendered by social media. But the nuances and complications with which Fu’s imagination enlivens the stories turns the tropes away from the expected, leaving the reader with much to mull over and contemplate.
Deservedly shortlisted for the 2022 Giller Prize and winner of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for best Canadian debut story collection, Lesser Known Monsters is a book I enjoyed even more on second reading. A world of strangeness in the everyday, and a world to be savoured.
Born in British Columbia to parents from Hong Kong, Kim Fu lives in Seattle, Washington. Fu teaches and mentors through multiple programs, and has received residency fellowships from the Ucross Foundation (Wyoming), the Berton House (Yukon), Wildacres (North Carolina), and the Wallace Stegner House (Saskatchewan). Fu’s first novel, For Today I Am a Boy (HarperCollins, 2014), won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and the Canadian Authors Association Emerging Writer Award. It was also a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her second novel, The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore (HarperCollins, 2018), was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Ontario Library Association Evergreen Award. Nightwood Editions published her poetry collection, How Festive the Ambulance, in 2016. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Granta, and the TLS.
photo Curtis Perry
Frances Boyle is the author of two books of fiction: Tower, a Rapunzel-infused novella (Fish Gotta Swim Editions, 2018) and Seeking Shade, a short story collection that was shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Award (The Porcupines’ Quill, 2020). Her poetry collections are Light-carved Passages (BuschekBooks, 2014, forthcoming in a new edition in 2024 with Doubleback Press), This White Nest (Quattro Books, 2019) and Openwork and Limestone (Frontenac House, 2022). Raised in Saskatchewan, Frances has long made her home in Ottawa.
Further
Header photo: Syrio, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
- Kim Fu website
- CBC links to Fu interviews, profiles
- Asian Heritage Fu bio
- Sean Sam interviews Kim Fu (Winter 2021) for LIGEIA magazine
