Kelly Link is armed to disarm teen readers

Handbags have entire civilizations in them; a poor woman who needs train fare sells her niece to a wizard. "The zombies were like Canadians," one story goes, "in that they looked enough like real people at first to fool you."

Link herself talks as if her corkscrewing, mind-bending, sardonic short stories -- which have earned raves from Jonathan Lethem and Neil Gaiman -- are easy to pull off.

"I'm assuming I'm not the only writer out there who loves both [H.P.] Lovecraft and Lorrie Moore," Link, 39, said by phone from her office near Northampton, Mass. "But what I get when I write is some Lovecraft, plus some Lorrie Moore, hopefully plus a little of me in there as well. So it's about infinite recombinations."

Her latest recombination may not be so simple: peddling stories that have been hits with fans of experimental and postmodern fiction to kids.

That's the task of "Pretty Monsters," a nine-story collection just released by Viking Children in a substantial print run of 40,000. The book gathers mostly old stories from two acclaimed collections put out by Small Beer Press, the hip house she runs with husband Gavin Grant.

"Pretty Monsters" could break this critics' darling to a larger audience -- readers wanting to move on from Harry Potter, for instance -- or leave a lot of 16-year-olds scratching their heads.

The move was inspired in part by the ardor of Viking editor Sharyn November, as well as the enthusiasm of a publisher that knows even in gray days for the book business, the YA audience continues to expand.

But will it fly?

"I think they very much can work in that format," said Judith Rosen, a Publishers Weekly correspondent. "She and her editor have worked together before on stories for the YA market, and I think they carefully culled these stories -- they have a direct narrative. She grips you right away; she has this wonderful way of addressing the reader as if you're her chum and then suddenly you're off. It wasn't like she said, 'Oh, I have these stories sitting around.' "

And Rosen pointed out, "Fantasy is incredibly popular with teenagers right now."

Most of the stories, Link said, were written for YA anthologies, including the 2006 McSweeney's collection "Noisy Outlaws."