Kim Fu (The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore) sheds an uncanny light on the emotional dissonance of modern life in Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, her strange and fantastic first collection of short stories.
In "Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867," the operator of a service that renders lifelike simulations based on a customer's input warns a prospective client that indulging in certain fantasies could lead to dangerous consequences. This concise opening story serves handily as a thematic overture for what follows: the unsettled (and often unsettling) boundary between reality and fantasy is a perpetual fascination of Fu across these 12 stories, as are the dark and strange expressions that desire finds through technology and art. Fu embraces the sorts of high-concept premises native to the weird fringes of science fiction and horror, deftly magnifying the strangeness of everyday anxieties.
"Twenty Hours" features a high-end consumer device that protects the wealthy from certain types of death; when a striving middle-class couple discovers that this allows them to murder each other without consequence, it casts their marital malaise into high relief. Meanwhile, "Sandman" showcases the author's knack for sketching a genuinely unnerving image. Riffing on a familiar folk tale, Fu presents the titular creature as a hooded, wraithlike figure, the stuff of nightmares. Yet to the story's insomniac protagonist, he brings a perverse sense of comfort with "his occasional, ecstatic visits between long seasons of wakefulness." By examining complex emotional dynamics like these through the prism of speculative fiction, Fu's stories expose the cracks in our sense of reality. --Theo Henderson, bookseller at Ravenna Third Place Books in Seattle, Wash.