THE DEEP ONES: "Lull" by Kelly Link
ConversazioniThe Weird Tradition
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1semdetenebre
"Lull" by Kelly Link
Discussion begins December 14, 2022.
First published in The New Wave Fabulists (2002).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?102090
SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS
The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror: Sixteenth Annual Collection
Magic for Beginners
ONLINE VERSIONS
https://weirdfictionreview.com/2014/06/lull/
ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS
No authorized online audio versions found to date.
MISCELLANY
https://kellylink.net/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Link
https://fictionwritersreview.com/interview/an-interview-with-kelly-link/
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/pages/i-can-see-right-through-you
https://tinyurl.com/38wn6nsj
Discussion begins December 14, 2022.
First published in The New Wave Fabulists (2002).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?102090
SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS
The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror: Sixteenth Annual Collection
Magic for Beginners
ONLINE VERSIONS
https://weirdfictionreview.com/2014/06/lull/
ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS
No authorized online audio versions found to date.
MISCELLANY
https://kellylink.net/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Link
https://fictionwritersreview.com/interview/an-interview-with-kelly-link/
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/pages/i-can-see-right-through-you
https://tinyurl.com/38wn6nsj
2paradoxosalpha
I really groove on the sort of nested narrative that this story supplies, and the complicating elements of time travel, phone-sex oracle, diabolical magic, and possible extraterrestrial involvement make it a real doozy. This story is surely one of the "weirdest" (in the vernacular sense) we've read in a while.
The biggest laugh item for me on this read was probably the description of Ed's latest game release: "The one with the baby heads and the octopus girlies, the Martian combat hockey." But I thought the tone of the story was impressive for bringing together that sort of comedy with genuine pathos, in a sort of matrix of overdetermined absurdity.
The biggest laugh item for me on this read was probably the description of Ed's latest game release: "The one with the baby heads and the octopus girlies, the Martian combat hockey." But I thought the tone of the story was impressive for bringing together that sort of comedy with genuine pathos, in a sort of matrix of overdetermined absurdity.
3paradoxosalpha
It turns out that Link is an LT member (although not a badged "LT Author"): https://www.librarything.com/profile/kellylink
4paradoxosalpha
Related bloggery worth reading (which I found via Kenton's image search link): Lull: An Analysis
Blogger Artichoke sorts out the story's plot and theme elements, mostly in ways I agree with.
Blogger Artichoke sorts out the story's plot and theme elements, mostly in ways I agree with.
5paradoxosalpha
Artichoke's analysis claims: "But while the nesting of stories has a palindromic aspect, the story is obviously itself not a palindrome. If anything, the real structure of the story is visible as a sort of cone – a gradual clarification, down to a single point."
I'm not so sure. Look at the first and last sentences, and you can see a mirroring, where both indicate stasis.
First - "There was a lull in the conversation."
Last - "The hands aren't moving, but he can wait."
The green glowing clock at the end mirrors the green table at the beginning.
I have an untested hypothesis that the story would be equally compelling and make the same sense if read backwards in four chunks:
1) The final untitled section beginning, "Starlight says, 'My voice is getting scratchy.'"
2) The subsection headed "It Gets Better"
3) The subsection headed "The Devil and the Cheerleader"
4) The initial untitled section.
ETA: Or perhaps the palindromic conceit is to motivate just such a reverse reading following on the forward one--the way you confirm that you are actually seeing a palindrome--in order to apply what Artichoke calls "learned context" to the early parts of the story:
"The important things are drowned in a mass of detail that flatten their significance, drowned out with static, but we can fish them out using the lens of learned context."
I'm not so sure. Look at the first and last sentences, and you can see a mirroring, where both indicate stasis.
First - "There was a lull in the conversation."
Last - "The hands aren't moving, but he can wait."
The green glowing clock at the end mirrors the green table at the beginning.
I have an untested hypothesis that the story would be equally compelling and make the same sense if read backwards in four chunks:
1) The final untitled section beginning, "Starlight says, 'My voice is getting scratchy.'"
2) The subsection headed "It Gets Better"
3) The subsection headed "The Devil and the Cheerleader"
4) The initial untitled section.
ETA: Or perhaps the palindromic conceit is to motivate just such a reverse reading following on the forward one--the way you confirm that you are actually seeing a palindrome--in order to apply what Artichoke calls "learned context" to the early parts of the story:
"The important things are drowned in a mass of detail that flatten their significance, drowned out with static, but we can fish them out using the lens of learned context."
6RandyStafford
Link certainly packs the story with weird elements and, if you were going to write a synopsis of this story, it wouldn't be much shorter because almost every sentence is crucial to . . . well, something.
This story completely bounced off me despite the promising opening, but then I'm not a fan of narratives with nested stories. Are there three or four stories in this piece?
I dimly took away the point that, contra to the cliche that "life only makes sense lived backward", life doesn't make much sense in this story whether time flows normally or reverses.
This story completely bounced off me despite the promising opening, but then I'm not a fan of narratives with nested stories. Are there three or four stories in this piece?
I dimly took away the point that, contra to the cliche that "life only makes sense lived backward", life doesn't make much sense in this story whether time flows normally or reverses.
7AndreasJ
Got around to reading this today.
As >2 paradoxosalpha: says, it's exceptionally lower-case weird. I liked various aspects of it, but dunno if they added up to a very satisfying whole. Perhaps, as Artichoke suggests, one needs to re-read it to get the most of it, but I usually reserve re-reading to stories I liked the first time.
That the Susans evidently didn't mind sharing Ed struck me as surprisingly male-fantasyish for a female author, but I guess it helped the general weirdness of the sequence, underlining that the Susans are somehow all one.
As >2 paradoxosalpha: says, it's exceptionally lower-case weird. I liked various aspects of it, but dunno if they added up to a very satisfying whole. Perhaps, as Artichoke suggests, one needs to re-read it to get the most of it, but I usually reserve re-reading to stories I liked the first time.
That the Susans evidently didn't mind sharing Ed struck me as surprisingly male-fantasyish for a female author, but I guess it helped the general weirdness of the sequence, underlining that the Susans are somehow all one.
8housefulofpaper
I didn't manage to read this until the Christmas holidays (when it made a jarring contrast with the selection of H. G. Wells' science fiction short stories that I was working through).
I felt thrown off-kilter by the story, but I don't think it was the nested story structure so much as my not being able to work out precisely where real-life American life ended and fantasy took over (when I realised this, it reminded me of some of the responses to Robert Aickman's "The Hospice": "it's definitely the Afterlife" and my feeling was "I don't know, I think it's just as likely the protagonist is just in England").
And after giving myself a couple of weeks to mull it over, I've started to almost resent the story. There were plenty of bits that I liked, but the conclusion I've come to is that the fantasy elements aren't really what's important here. They're a self-consciously clever, post-modern way of telling a story of a minor domestic tragedy.
I felt thrown off-kilter by the story, but I don't think it was the nested story structure so much as my not being able to work out precisely where real-life American life ended and fantasy took over (when I realised this, it reminded me of some of the responses to Robert Aickman's "The Hospice": "it's definitely the Afterlife" and my feeling was "I don't know, I think it's just as likely the protagonist is just in England").
And after giving myself a couple of weeks to mull it over, I've started to almost resent the story. There were plenty of bits that I liked, but the conclusion I've come to is that the fantasy elements aren't really what's important here. They're a self-consciously clever, post-modern way of telling a story of a minor domestic tragedy.
