Strange Folk You’ll Never Meet

A fugue of hunger, consumption, and motherhood unites the 21 fabulist shorts in Balaskovits’s exquisite second collection (after Magic for Unlucky Girls). Balaskovits uses modern sensibilities and scarcity to subvert classic genre tropes, rendering them tenderly, brutally human: the anticapitalist “The Tale of a Hungry Beauty” offers a profound deconstruction of Beauty and the Beast in deceptively simple prose, and the ominous “Strange Folk” refracts the concept of a small-town haunting in a way that’s both heartrending and genuine. The carnivaleque historical fantasy “The Mad Monk’s Weeping Daughter” and the soft but fierce “Get Bent” examine women’s pain as a complex, changeable state that can be exploited—or reclaimed. Though repeated themes cause several of the shorter vignettes to blur together, Balaskovits’s prose never fails to impress, capturing the cadence of fairy tales while bringing a literary sense of detail and subtext to clearly loved genre tropes. This accomplished collection interlocks the horrific and the wondrous through deliciously dry humor, resulting in a unique must-read for fans of Angela Carter, Maria Dahvana Headley, and A.S. Byatt. [em](Oct.) [/em]