I first encountered Karen Russell when I was a student, hunting for short-story writers in the library. Finding a copy of her debut collection St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, which was longlisted for the 2007 Guardian first book award, I took it home on a whim. With some books you begin a relationship with an author that will continue hungrily through everything they write. Russell’s writing inhabits its own universe, with metaphor and simile taking us to strange new places; we are led by the hand and find ourselves completely submerged, only later to come to, groggily, in our own world. In Russell’s second collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, women are silkworms and dead presidents live in the bodies of horses. In her novel Swamplandia! the Floridian swamps teem with alligator wrestlers; in her novella Sleep Donation, sleep is a sought-after commodity. Orange World is Russell’s third collection of short stories and it contains all her trademark signs of weirdness: a boy falls in love with a bog girl found preserved in the ground, a land on the watery edge of apocalypse is explored by a woman in a gondola, tornadoes are harnessed and sold at auction like cattle. The worlds of the stories are entirely convincing, small pockets in which it is possible to become lost.
In “The Bad Graft”, a couple, Angie and Andy, take a trip to a California national park, where the spirit of a Joshua tree leaps into Angie’s body. She finds herself unable to leave the desert, “the plant throbbing like a muscle”, “unfurling its languorous intelligence” inside her. We understand how Angie feels, attempting to “battle the invader”; how Andy feels, confused and terrified; and also how the uprooted Joshua tree feels, away from comfort, fighting for control. The landscape of the desert surrounds them, toxic and uninhabitable. They are also surrounded by the landscape of their failing relationship: the honeymoon period over, the weighty burden of bills and unsuccessful evenings. Again and again Andy repeats: “Remember how we met?”, straining for something that is no longer there. Inside the woman, the Joshua tree dreams of dancing and violence, and at times we are wholeheartedly on its side.
In many of the stories there is a dark ecological anxiety not far from the surface; the world aches like a wound around characters who know only too late that they should be afraid. The natural world is burdened by intimations of climate crisis and Russell’s protagonists are burdened, too, each hunting for something that is lost to them: love or solitude, money or freedom. Often her characters are loners, trapped on the outside looking in, mulling their heavy mistakes. Where another writer might draw back, Russell forges forward. The boy with his dead bog girl girlfriend takes her to his room and shuts the door. “Where are you going?” asks his mother. “Aw, Mom. Where do you th-th-think?”
Always Russell’s writing reaches past beauty to find the oddity, the heat beneath. In the title story she writes about motherhood: “Orange World is a nest of tangled electrical cords and open drawers filled with steak knives.” This is where most of us live – as opposed to Green World, “a fantasy of soft corners and infinite attention”. Orange World is a weary place where we cannot protect our children as much as we need to. Instead a young mother barters with a devil who crouches, like Stephen King’s Pennywise, in the drain outside her house and demands her breast milk. She is seen by a passing car, laid out, elbows in the drain water, “triangular head on her collarbone, using its thin-fingered paws to squeeze milk from her left breast into its hairy snout”, but she does not care. Here is the desperation of parenthood. The devil is something to fear, but so is the new moms group: their “freakishly huge” adult faces, the torrent of advice and smug concern. Fairytale monsters are frightening, but so too are our houses, families and friends.
Along with other US short-story writers such as Kelly Link and Lauren Groff, Russell inhabits landscape entirely, bringing the Floridian humidity to every sentence. Where other writers shift towards the novel, aside from the wonderful Swamplandia! she remains steadfastly a short-story writer, and Orange World demonstrates how her attention to this tricky craft has paid off. Though her characters are living their own magic-realist, fabulist lives, it is possible to see ourselves within them, peering out.
• Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under is published by Vintage. Orange World by Karen Russell is published by Chatto and Windus (RRP £14.99) To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
