"Young adult readers are pretty passionate," she said. "They're often sophisticated readers; they're still at the age when they're reading for pleasure and still have time to read. They're not making distinctions between high and low forms: They like what they like."
Link, who grew up in Miami and in Greensboro, N.C., said she's "been up to my neck, from the beginning, in genre."
It was as a teenage bookworm who loved science fiction, Anne McCaffrey and Roald Dahl that she decided she wanted to become a writer.
"I was pretty lax about it," she recalled. "I pictured a writer's life as being pretty good. I wasn't actually writing. I worked on yearbook. I wrote poetry. I thought, 'I'll get started any minute now. As soon as I get done reading this book, I'll sit down and write stuff. There's plenty of other stuff to do as a teenager. And I went to college and finally figured out how to write short stories."
She earned degrees from Columbia and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro without ever being forced to write what she calls "mimetic" fiction. "I never had a teacher say, 'Could you do this but take out the fantastic elements?' "
While at college, she found revised versions of folklore, as well as Angela Carter's feminist reimaginings of fairy tales.
"I was layering all that on top of the faerie tales I read as a kid," Link said. "Just that revelation that you can tell the same story, over and over again, if you bring something new to it. Faerie tales and mythologies are so bare bones that they are infinitely variable. You can rework them over and over again, and they are strong enough narratives that they can support that kind of work."
The typical Link story begins with a startling premise related in a matter-of-fact voice: "All of this happened because a boy I once knew named Miles Sperry decided to go into the resurrectionist business and dig up the grave of his girlfriend, Bethany Baldwin, who had been dead for not quite a year." That's from the new collection's first story, "The Wrong Grave."
As in oral storytelling -- as well as the meta-fictional work of writers such as Donald Barthelme -- the narrator often addresses the reader directly, which can do odd things to a story's tone. As Rosen put it, "The magic seems so everyday you almost forget we're talking about magic. The narrator makes it very matter of fact."
