In “Liddy, First to Fly,” the second story in Kim Fu’s new collection, four best friends perch at the edge of puberty. When Liddy develops bulbous and watery zit-like bumps on her ankles, the girls are horrified yet fascinated; when she sprouts oily black wings, the girls keep secrets from their mothers. The wings don’t feel especially extraordinary at a time when the girls’ bodies and emotions are already transforming. To the story’s narrator, the reality of her friend’s new wings feels more like a game of make-believe they’ve barely outgrown: “The realm of pretend had only just closed its doors to us, and light leaked through around the edges.”

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is Kim Fu’s third book and first collection of short stories. All twelve works of genre-defying fiction orbit around the exact sentiment of Liddy’s story; the not-quite-real leaks around the edges of everything in this collection. Fu’s characters, settings, and situations seem grounded in recognizable reality: a grieving daughter longs for time with her mother; a bride feels apprehensive before her wedding; a married couple bickers, then reconciles. These ordinary premises transform as Fu’s imagination seeps between the lines, welcoming readers into the dark realm of the pretend with elements of fantasy, horror, and speculative fiction.

“Time Cubes” takes place in a future where humans no longer venture outdoors. Alice lives in the Mall, on the seventy-fifth floor of the south tower, and works in basement five of the east tower. Her Depressive Specialist’s advice becomes a mantra, reverberating its grim tone through not only this story but the entire collection: “The recent past was worse, the future would almost certainly be worse, and the present was worse for most other people, living elsewhere.” When Alice encounters a kiosk vendor whose box-like gadgets control the speed and direction of time for the living objects inside — a frog, a fern — Alice discovers her own long-dormant sense of fascination, and perhaps a means of escape.

Throughout this collection, Fu exhibits a chilling ability to create windows through which readers catch striking glimpses of what others usually keep private. One character sounds “excessively cheerful … like she was constantly lying.” A loving husband who has just poisoned his wife admits in a lengthy testimony, “I wanted you to not exist for a while. I wanted to move through the world without you in it.” In another story, the Sandman seduces an insomniac, and Fu’s deliberate, sensory description of her character’s experience sends chills down the spine.

Some stories read like futuristic fables, others like haunting premonitions. In “The Doll,” a collective of neighborhood kids witness an ongoing suburban tragedy. Although at first akin to Jeffrey Eugenides’ Virgin Suicides, the story morphs into something unpredictable as a supernatural presence creeps into the children’s bedrooms. Unfamiliar elements of technology, fantasy, and horror heighten the startlingly recognizable human emotions of Fu’s characters. The stories are strongest when Fu brings her imagination fully into play. Like any collection, this one contains undeniable standouts, while a few stories set a masterful scene only to drop off just before the final beat, leaving the reader dangling without somewhere quite as thought-provoking to land.

Nonetheless, with each page-turn into a new world of wild possibility, I felt the euphoria of jumping and not knowing where I might end up. “In This Fantasy” features a narrator who is a spinster landlord in the nineteenth century, and then a woman who encounters a wolf while chopping wood at daybreak, and finally a milky-skinned and ill-fated princess on the eve of revolution. “Scissors” pulls readers through the all-penetrating intimacy of a queer couple’s erotic performance before an audience of flinching, breathless show-goers.

Fu’s collection brought me back to an era of reading past my bedtime, when I sped through as many of Ray Bradbury’s short stories as I could get my hands on. Since then, I’ve doubted I would find another writer with the same exhilarating range. Fu boldly carries all that I loved of Bradbury’s fiction––its variety, sensitivity, and immense creative power––into a new era with short stories that captivate and terrify, shock and inspire. Lesser Known Monsters is a uniquely mesmerizing collection to which I’ll be eager to return, time and time again.

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