by Corrine Watson
February 2, 2022
Corrine Watson is a freelance writer and editor based in Charlotte, NC with her baby dragon, Ophelia. Corrine enjoys writing speculative fiction that hovers on the edges of reality and dares to dip into the mysterious. Keep up with Corrine on Twitter @CorrineWatson6
Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu; Tin House Books; 220 pages; $16.95
Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is an amalgamation of human contradiction, as Fu explores the underlying darkness of her character’s desires. This collection of twelve stories draws the reader into realities that are both familiar yet surreal. While some stories utilize futuristic technology, others dip into the realm of magical realism, yet they all are grounded by the everyday problems of human life.
Fu often explores a familiar sense of longing for the past or nostalgia for what was lost, yet the plot is fraught with the complexities and harmful implications of living in the past. As the collection opens with “Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867,” we are immediately thrust into this futuristic world exclusively contained in the dialogue between the client and virtual reality digital assistant. While the client thinks her request to see her dead mother one last time is simple, the operator struggles to convey the dangers of this request as it is rejected. Through this story we are introduced to the potential harms of technology as well as our own desires as the operator argues that certain simulations are banned because they are proven to be addictive. This desire to relive the past is also explored in “Do You Remember Candy,” as a woman tries to recreate the nostalgic sensations from eating food in a world where everyone has lost their sense of taste. Her clients are secretive as if they are ashamed to admit this desire because it “feels like a weakness, a deficiency of character, to be pining for the past this way.”
In a darker turn, the story “Twenty Hours” is about a husband reflecting on murdering his wife while her body and consciousness are being reprinted on a machine in the basement. Although the machine was intended for use if there was an accidental death, he suggests the first murder was done out of curiosity, but now he’s doing it out of boredom, or an unspoken frustration. In spite of the violence, the husband’s desires are contradictory to his actions as the most horrible thing he can imagine is living without his wife, if one day, the machine doesn’t work. He wants to be “a widowed wreck, boredom and disdain and resentment drained away after a medieval bloodletting, knowing she’s the only person who will understand.” Beyond the violence, Fu writes this story in a way that blurs the lines between guilt and love. The way the husband thinks about what he will cook for his wife when she’s reprinted or cleans up the house feels both loving and considerate, while also resonating with airs of contrition which is arguably a characteristic of domestic abusers. This contradiction haunts the husband as he is afraid of answering the question of why he killed her. His wife only killed him on one occasion and upon returning from his own reprinting it occurred to him that he’d been inattentive and unloving, and his murder “became a declaration” of her love, signalling how desperate she is for his attention. This suggests that taking these twenty-hour pauses is the couple’s way of rekindling their love and working through their personal desires or curiosities in spite of the risky reliance on the technology that revives them.
Fu masterfully illustrates the complexity of desire and the fine lines that interlock it with fear or something darker. “Scissors” explores sexual desire as a couple performs a dominant and submissive act in a theater for an audience of strangers. The story plays on sensory detail as if we’re both the audience looking on at Dee, or experiencing Dee’s perspective while blindfolded; and it’s both kinky, terrifying, and loving as she expresses her trust in her partner. Dee needs to be in control to give that up, and while the couple has built this sense of trust, Dee is unable to tell if the touching is El or the hands of the greedy crowd. Through this story Fu illustrates the natural human need to feel in control even in situations where we are powerless, and yet in the care of someone we trust, we’re willing to relinquish some of that control and test boundaries in ways that are uncomfortable yet thrilling. And the tease of thrill only makes us want it more.
As reality is swept away by the fantastic, we encounter an infestation of out of season beetles, a sea monster, and a girl who sprouts wings as if it were one of the many expected changes in a girl’s body as she reaches maturity. Yet these are not the 21st century monsters Fu is bringing to light in her stories. Rather they focus on abusive relationships, loss of innocence, insomnia, and depression, which are monstrous in their own private ways as the characters long for reprieve from their suffering. Fu takes these common struggles and endows them with these mystical characteristics in ways that don’t diminish the issue, but portray it in a different light. This gives the stories a haunting resonance as our characters are left enlightened often at the cost of innocence and the knowledge that they will not find peace in the ways they’d dreamed. In “Sandman,” an insomniac forms a relationship with or dependence on the Sandman who sporadically visits her at night. Although she claims indifference to her condition, she still goes through the motions of attempting to improve her sleep hygiene even though it feels like she’s turning “rest into work” as her efforts are ineffective. When the Sandman comes to her, sleep is effortless and she awakes with this sense of superhuman clarity and energy which is more likely just the effects of getting proper sleep after spending so much time awake, but the story attributes these feelings to the supernatural gifts she’s been given through her nights with the Sandman. After a prolonged hiatus from his visits, she finds herself at her worst as she constantly floats between half states of sleep without achieving rest. When he returns she wonders why he doesn’t come to her every night like he does others. She wants to be normal, but to the Sandman her ability to see the world while it sleeps is what made her special. This story stands out as it takes the banality of daily life from commuting, work, and filling the time leading up to sleep, while giving this common sleep disorder mystical qualities that make it feel like both a curse and a gift.
In some of the less speculative stories, Fu centers the plot around the death of strangers. This seems odd at first, but as these stories progress we see how the protagonists’ distance gives them the space to attribute the deceased and their death with larger than life qualities as if to separate themselves from the banality and insignificance of tragedy. On the surface,“The Doll,” is about a group of neighborhood children who believe they are being haunted by their dead neighbor’s babydoll, but the way Fu structures the story illustrates the community’s need to feel safe by turning Mullen's death into a legend. Although the doll is the vessel of their perceived haunting and the cause of the dreams they have of the Mullens and their death, it is clear that they are just children trying to understand the complexities of death and attribute reason to the tragedy. Although the Mullens lived in the neighborhood, they were outside of the community social circle as the kids were remembered as odd for their bowl cut hair, old fashioned clothes, or the fact that they attend private school. As our narrator reflects on one of his only interactions with the Mullen’s daughter, he thinks, “remembering her as strange, as marked,” gives her death a sense of reason as if the family’s strangeness made their demise almost inevitable. The adults note “how terrifying, what a tragedy, could have happened to anyone, their fear so false it sounded smug. Because it didn’t happen to anyone, it happened to the Mullens.” This shows how society feeds on tragedy and in a morbid vicarious way. We can’t help but imagine ourselves in the place of real victims, but if we turn the tragedy into a legend with a cast of peculiar characters, we can maintain the belief that bad things don’t happen to normal people.
The vibrantly imaginative tales found in Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century turn the mundane into the fantastic. The characters in this collection want to be seen, loved, and to live out their darkest fantasies and their experiences are both frightening and euphoric and illustrate the price we pay to fulfill our deepest desires.
©2022 West Trade Review
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Exploring the Complexity of Longing and Desire in Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century
FICTION REVIEW
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