Top Shelf in March: VAMPIRES IN THE LEMON GROVE

Top Shelf in March: Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell
Reviewed by Liz (Car Dancin’ Queen) Wyckoff

I’ve been in love with Karen Russell since the publication of her first short story collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, in 2008. The incredible title story of that book follows a group of young women who have, literally, been raised by werewolves as they attempt to navigate their new Catholic boarding school.  Within the first paragraph, having forgotten “all the promises [they] made to be civilized and lady-like,” the girls behave the way they were raised: snarling and “spraying exuberant yellow streams all over the bunks.” In that moment, as I pictured a pack of wild girls howling and peeing all over a dorm room, I knew was hooked.

Now, whenever I think about Russell, my mind often drifts back to the giddy feeling I had when I encountered that first story: I loved the hilarious descriptions of young girls acting like wolves, but even more, I loved the larger implications of the story, the way its seriousness snuck up on me and got me thinking about gender and race and ethnicity, and the way it made me feel joyful and proud and vulnerable and full of longing—all the best ways a story can make you feel.

In Vampires in the Lemon Grove. her second story collection, Russell continues to hone her unique voice and to stretch the limits of her readers’ imaginations. She also lets her stories get a little darker than before. Despite the playfulness of their conceits, most have realistic, even somber, emotional cores. Russell still invites readers into her narratives with enticing set-ups—an old vampire sucking on fruit in a touristy Italian lemon grove; a barn full of dead US presidents who’ve found themselves reincarnated as horses. But after acclimating readers to her amusing imaginary worlds, Russell raises the stakes. The characters may be vampires and horses, but they wrestle with loneliness and desire, life and death—the stuff that concerns us flawed humans every day.

Reeling for the Empire, one of the most poignant stories in the collection, features a group of twenty young women in Meiji-era Japan who have been coerced into grueling factory work. After being sent away to help their poor families out of debt, the girls soon find themselves actually becoming silkworms—producing dense skeins of silk inside their abdomens, which machines then pull from their hands and fingertips onto a loom. Russell’s brilliance truly shines here, in her ability to use elements of magic as tools in her stories. She challenges us to use our minds like children again—to imagine the silk thread magically forming inside the narrator’s stomach. But at the same time, the story gets us thinking about child labor, and modernization, and the terror of a government exercising control over women’s bodies. It’s difficult to strike such a delicate balance within the span of a short story, but Russell makes it look easy.

Vampires in the Lemon Grove is guaranteed to make you giddy and sad and delighted and filled with awe—the best ways a story collection can make you feel.

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