Mar 26

Mar 26 Out There: Stories

Author: Kate Folk
Publisher: Random House
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

With a focus on the weird and eerie forces that lurk beneath the surface of ordinary experience, Kate Folk’s debut short story collection is perfectly pitched to the madness of our current moment. A medical ward for a mysterious bone-melting disorder is the setting of a perilous love triangle. A curtain of void obliterates the globe at a steady pace, forcing Earth’s remaining inhabitants to decide with whom they want to spend eternity. A man fleeing personal scandal enters a codependent relationship with a house that requires a particularly demanding level of care. And in the title story, originally published in The New Yorker, a woman in San Francisco uses dating apps to find a partner despite the threat posed by “blots,” preternaturally handsome artificial men dispatched by Russian hackers to steal data. Meanwhile, in a poignant companion piece, a woman and a blot forge a genuine, albeit doomed, connection.

Prescient and wildly imaginative, Out There depicts an uncanny landscape that holds a mirror to our subconscious fears and desires. Each story beats with its own fierce heart, and together they herald an exciting new arrival in the tradition of speculative literary fiction.

TL;DR Review

Out There is a collection of the exact kind of short stories I love: punchy, speculative, feminist, metaphorical, and weird. Kate Folk is definitely on my watchlist now!

For you if: You like weird short stories with strong metaphors.

Full Review

Thank you Random House for the advanced review copy of this book! I had such a good time diving in and out of these weird, speculative, feminist short stories. In fact, these are my exact favorite kinds of stories.

If you like weird, speculative stories, you’ll like this collection as well. It opens with the title story, which takes place in a world/future where women have to be wary of accidentally dating “blots,” aka artificial men who lure them on a trip to Big Sur to steal their identities. The final story in the collection returns to this world, too, which was delightful. Other examples include grad students living in a house that’s alive, a woman who takes her desperation not to be alone a step too far in a medical ward where she’s being treated for nightly bone melting, and a woman fleeing the apocalypse determined not to go into the afterlife tethered to anyone else.

The stories are well placed and nicely arranged, with super-short ones interspersed with medium and long ones. Kate Folk has a talent for pulling on the string of a metaphor until it’s taut and humming. Also, just a warning: Several of these stories rely on what could be considered body horror — their weirdness is tied to organs, or the central metaphor uses bodies as a symbol for something else. I thought this was really well done, but if you’re particularly squeamish just keep that in mind.

Kate Folk is definitely on my author watchlist now!