By Zack Gill
Copy Editor
Last year the Pulitzer Board decided, amidst great controversy, not to award the Pulitzer Prize for Literature to any of its three nominees, which consisted of expected literary giants like the late MacArthur-certified genius David Foster Wallace and National Book Award winner Denis Johnson. Its final nominee, though, was newcomer Karen Russell for her debut novel, the much-lauded “Swamplandia.”
Russell’s newest collection of short stories, “Vampires in the Lemon Grove,” is her first book since “Swamplandia” and her nomination, as well as her first publication to primarily feature settings other than Russell’s native Florida. Veering from magical realism to the depths of the absurd (think Monty Python, not Albert Camus) from humor to horror, Russell’s collection is playful, inventive and often wrenching.
Russell has said that the throughline in the stories of “Vampires in the Lemon Grove” is addiction. In the collection’s titular and first story, Clyde the vampire spends decades wandering the Earth, feasting on the necks of the meek and helpless. Eventually, he meets another vampire, Magreb, who teaches him that, other than the whole immortality thing, vampirism is more than how it’s portrayed in the movies Clyde has seen.
The two proceed to wander the world in search of home, eventually settling in a lemon grove in Italy. (Its lemons have a similar consistency when bitten into as a neck). Still, even though Clyde knows that blood does nothing, in a distrurbing scene, he takes the life of an attractive, innocent worker at the lemon grove (everything he isn’t — vampires may not die, but it turns out that they do age). “Vampires in the Lemon Grove” is actually one of the weakest stories of the collection, but it serves as a wonderful tonal and thematic introduction to the rest of Russell’s stories.
Russell’s forays into pure farce are more of a mixed bag. On one hand, “Dougbert Shackleton’s Rules for Antarctic Tailgating” is sort of like an un-nuanced version of an early George Saunders story. Presented as a rule book for prospective “Food Chain Games” tailgaters (who literally voyage to the Antarctic to cheer on various parts of the food chain — the narrator roots for perpetual underdog Team Krill), the story is certainly imaginative and is occasionally uproariously funny, but it feels almost like a paint-by-numbers attempt for Russell to emulate Saunders, an acknowledged key influence — and unlike Saunders’ stories, it does not have much of substance to say about anything in particular.
On the other hand, “The Barn at the End of the Term” is simultaneously the collection’s funniest, strangest and one of its best stories. It portrays the afterlife of several presidents, all of them having woken up after their deaths as a horse on a farm. Together they struggle to figure out their purpose and decide whether they are actually in heaven or not, while horse Rutherford B. Hayes, the story’s protagonist, pines for his deceased wife, who may or may not be reincarnated as one of the farm’s sheep.
The story stays away from satire, even if its premise suggests otherwise. Instead, it focuses on its characters’ desires, mainly for power, and ends up somewhere along the lines of a stirring, if humorous, mediation of loss.
Karen Russell’s “Vampires in the Lemon Grove” is wonderful but has undeniably been released at an unfortunate time: in the shadow of George Saunders’ collection, already considered monumental in contemporary American letters, “Tenth of December.” With so much of Saunders’ genetics evident in Russell’s own writing, one cannot help but compare, and although Russell’s collection does not have the magnitude of Saunders,’ it is colorful, original and often transcendent. “Vampires in the Lemon Grove” is available in bookstores now from Knopf.
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