Like most other collections of short stories, Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is a bit of a mixed bag. Out of the 12 stories, only 2 really stood out to me while the rest blended together somewhat. The author uses fantastical elements to explore familiar themes and dynamics. I liked her use of magical realism and found that it suited her story’s subject matter. In the second story for example a girl on the cusps of adolescence sprouts wings. There is a story about an insomniac who receives visits from the Sandman. Another one features a haunted doll. Grief, guilt, and mortality are the running motifs in this collection. The author's use of the absurd permeates her realistic scenarios with a sense of surreality. Her prose was not only compelling but interspersed throughout there were some beautiful descriptions and clever observations. Despite this, I did not find her collection particularly memorable. While I did find the first two stories to be touching and creative, the ones that followed played around with vaguely formulaic concepts that are very much staples of the magical realism genre. Additionally, some of these stories just came across as writing exercises (and they stuck too closely to the ‘how to write a short story’ formula). Still, even if I wasn’t blown away by this collection it was far from an unpleasant read and I will probably check out more by this author.

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu is a debut short story collection that takes a trip into the weird and fantastical but, ultimately, doesn't leave the vehicle. I found most of the stories underwhelming as they seem to comprised of a series of ideas that don't go together to the point where the stories itself lost the original premise. I hope the success of this book means there is more appetite for these kind of collections in general, but I was ultimately not wowed by this one.

One of my favorite books of the year. Beautifully speculative, enlightening and philosophical, worrisome and hopeful.

This was exactly what I like from a short story collection. Original, unique, and pretty weird. Very interested to see what comes next from the author. It is hard to do short stories well, and I rarely like them due to this.

What a fantastic short story collection! Kim Fu is a beautiful writer. I will definitely read more from her in the future. Her prose is so razor-sharp, witty, and deeply profound. The only story that didn't connect with me was the opener, "Pre-Simulation". But overall, I truly enjoyed these 12 stories. "#ClimbingNation", "The Doll", "Bridezilla", "Liddy, First to Fly" were some of the stand-outs. My favorite was "Junebugs". This story deals with domestic violence. Such an important and moving story. Don't let this underrated book pass you by. Excellent work of fiction.

This collection of speculative short fic by Kim Fu is a fun, fast read. She has a polished, lyrical style and a vivid imagination. Each of her twelve stories' premises hooked me and kept me turning pages, but I found that they often ended abruptly. I would have liked a little more space for the landing. Recommended for fans of Karen Russell and George Saunders.

Review published in the speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons on 06/20/2022.


Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu

In spring of 2020, video conferencing apps came of age with COVID-19. One quirk of video calls that wasn’t immediately apparent was self view, which researchers have since identified as a leading cause of Zoom fatigue. [1] We tire when forced to watch ourselves for hours, and we end up asking the current speaker to repeat themselves because we were too busy checking our hair or crooked shirt collar. Sometimes we miss details entirely and message coworkers and classmates afterwards, not wanting to embarrass ourselves by admitting we weren’t paying attention.

Beyond self view on Zoom, what creates these small disconnects in communication, and what are we missing as a result? Kim Fu’s short story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century consists of twelve stories where the strange meets the mundane and examines these questions from multiple angles. (Fu has two previously published novels and one poetry collection, but this is her debut short story collection and her first foray into speculative fiction.)

Fu’s style is tight and visceral, and she brings to life haunting hypothetical possibilities and encounters with the strange with clean prose. Many of the stories in Lesser Known Monsters center on how we interact with technology both real and imagined. In “Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867,” a grieving caller convinces a simulation phone operator to see her deceased mother one last time. In “#ClimbingNation,” one of the few stories without speculative elements, a woman visits a memorial for a YouTube-famous college acquaintance, convincing his sister and climbing friends that she was his friend instead of merely a fan. Several of these stories feature suburban children as narrators, such as “The Doll,” where a group of children stumble across a possibly haunted doll formerly owned by a girl who had passed away from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Beyond the horror-tinged “The Doll,” the protagonists of “Liddy, First to Fly” are a group of four girls, one of whom, Liddy, starts growing feathers on her lower legs that resemble “a downy, slimy, just-birthed animal, newly ejected from its mother” (p. 18). The other girls initially assume the wound on her leg is ringworm until they see the feathers. They help Liddy practice jumping in secret from their mothers, because they know adults either won’t see the feathers or will convince themselves the feathers aren’t there.

One adult could have seen what we saw and carried it quietly within her forever. But not four. Four adults have to agree on what happened, agree on the rules. Four adults can talk to each other until reality straightens, until doubt is crushed, until their memories unstitch and reform. (p. 31)

The near-magical ability of adults to rationalize away the strange is a skill the girls, who are only starting to hit their growth spurts, haven’t gained yet. Like the adults in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s childhood classic The Little Prince, to be an adult in Fu’s story is to be closed to possibilities and to not understand the logic of the children’s world. In the children’s minds, the chasm between childhood and adulthood is wide enough that not even the wings would be enough to open the adults’ eyes, an idea that comes back in both “The Doll” and “Do You Remember Candy.”

The adults in Fu’s worlds struggle with technology disrupting both relationships and smaller-scale interpersonal interactions. In “Twenty Hours,” which begins with the compelling opening line of “After I killed my wife, I had twenty hours before her new body finished printing downstairs,” a husband and wife own a printer capable of reprinting new bodies after sudden, accidental deaths (p. 83). Instead of using it as intended (that is, saving it for a disaster or accident), they repeatedly murder each other because they can do so with no consequences except a twenty-hour wait time for a new body. The motif of missed connections returns as the husband reflects on killing his wife, which would sound absurd to his less-fortunate neighbors unable to afford the printer. He ponders where his wife goes in the twenty-hour gap between her death and return and wonders what his wife does alone in between his own deaths. The printer has isolated them from their peers and each other, not unlike how cell phones have led to couples texting other people during dates instead of paying attention to each other.

Through the printer, Fu posits that new technologies both isolate and connect us, and in a similar vein, the previously mentioned “#ClimbingNation” examines parasocial relationships. The term “parasocial interaction” was created in 1956 by Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl, psychologists interested in the relationship between TV presenters and their audiences, but the internet has allowed parasocial interactions to proliferate and has generated renewed academic interest. [2] In “#ClimbingNation,” the recently deceased YouTube rock climbing star Travis “had a way of addressing a room full of people and making it feel like he was only talking to you” (p. 56). The narrator April tears up at the memorial as she lies about how she and Travis were college friends, but she soon discovers that he was secretive and kept large parts of himself out of the public eye and even from his friends and family. Travis’s sister Miki mentions two teenage girls who never knew him in person and concludes, “At first, I was going to ask them to leave, but then I thought, who was I to say they didn’t know him just as well as any of us?” (pp. 59-60)

Fu validates the idea that a viewer knows the public figure in a small way, even if it is only the most polished and publicly presentable version of the public figure. April experiences real grief at Travis’s death, enough to make her seek out his memorial for answers about his passing. As social media has become an ever-present force, parasocial relationships have become a fact of modern life, and “#ClimbingNation” presents one possibility of what these relationships will look like as influencers and internet personalities age.

The final story in this collection, “Do You Remember Candy,” is eerily reminiscent of the current coronavirus pandemic and ties together the recurring ideas in this collection nicely. Told in third person from the point of view of a freelance web designer named Allie and her twelve-year-old daughter Jay, “Do You Remember Candy” begins with a day where everyone loses their sense of taste and all food suddenly tastes repulsive for everyone worldwide. In Allie’s world, “the stock markets crash, multibillion-dollar industries collapse, but so much doesn’t change. […] Allie isn’t released from her obligations. […] Clients still expect their designs on time” (p. 199). Both the loss of taste and Allie’s work routine echo the experiences of anyone who has lived through the past two years.

Jay, Allie’s preteen daughter, doesn’t understand why her mother and her friends are so caught up with remembering what food tasted like, leading Allie to conclude that her generation is the last one to understand food.

And Allie realizes Jay will never understand. The people demanding Allie’s services will be gone in a generation. […] The sensuous, life-affirming pleasure upon which whole cultures were built, which caused empires to rise and fall, will die with Allie and her peers. (p. 214)

Similarly, the children of today will never have known a world without video conferencing apps and COVID-19, as the virus is predicted to become endemic. Like the girls in “Liddy, First to Fly” who assume a collective group of adults will refuse to see Liddy’s wings, Jay doesn’t believe her mother was ever capable of feeling the same way as she is, again bringing back the idea of how two people will never fully comprehend each other’s perspectives no matter how close they are and despite technological or magical intervention. Even though the sudden loss of taste was a worldwide event everyone experienced, it makes the disconnect between Allie and her daughter worse and widens the already existing generation gap. Allie will never understand how Jay and her friends don’t miss candy and char siu bao, and Jay will never understand what her mother and her friends miss about food.

Jay dances as it snows outside in the final scene of the story, and she is “the picture of joy” (p. 214). Despite losing the ability to taste food, for Allie at least one of life’s greatest pleasures, the ending is a hopeful one as Jay and Allie adapt and carve out their own niches. Perhaps Fu is remarking that little moments of happiness are possible even when everything has changed for the worse, an optimistic end to this story and this short story collection.

From the surreal masses of june bugs coating an apartment to a runaway bride running towards a sea monster, the mix of technology and fabulism in Fu’s worlds is a fun house mirror or a Zoom self view window onto our world. The stories force us to examine who the real lesser known monsters of the 21st century are. Are the monsters the technologies, winged humans, and haunted dolls? Or are we, the people who live and adapt to the strange, the real monsters? This collection is ideal for reflecting upon the past two pandemic years and for the Internet Age as a whole.

Endnotes:

[1] Bailenson, J. N. (2021). Nonverbal overload: A theoretical argument for the causes of Zoom fatigue. Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 2(1). DOI: 10.1037/tmb0000030 [return]

[2] Ballantine, P. W., & Martin, B. A. S. (2005). Forming parasocial relationships in online communities. ACR North American Advances, 32. [return]

Kim Fu's Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is a short story collection that blends several genres like science fiction, fantasy, and crime.

I like Fu's style and the way she engages the reader with elements of everyday life but juxtaposes it with an eerie mood or strange turn of events. There isn't one story that I wouldn't reread; there are no skips. It would be difficult to choose a favorite, although I quite liked "Twenty Hours" and "Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867." I also appreciated the ambiguity and the tension Fu created.

I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys short stories or likes to dabble in speculative fiction.

Fu has created a collection of stories that is poised to be one of the best books of the year. Strange, beautiful and enigmatic; each of the the tales in Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century will stay with you for a long time.

I didn’t really find anything to particularly like or dislike about this collection of unrelated short stories.
The debate about the possible dangers of fantasy fulfillment was interesting in “Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867” and the insect infestation in “June Bugs” initially had a nice creepy factor that became muted when the story devolved into a tale of domestic abuse. Maybe I was misled by the title. There are no monsters here and the book was just OK for me.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

This was book such a surprise--a wonderful surprise! 

Full of slightly macabre and fascinating stories, I was riveted and constantly curious as to what else Kim Fu's mind could whip up. 

Tales of 3D printers that can regrow a spouse that you've killed a few times over, haunted dolls, and legs that start sprouting feathers--Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century was brilliantly done.

One of the best aspects of this is that Fu never seemed to take anything too seriously with these tales. Instead, she wove these stories in the vein of the plausible--even when entirely implausible. As if the reader and the author were both aware of a strange world that already existed. Fu takes for granted that, as a reader, we can follow along with her logic as if it's just another day where the Sandman will come visit. 

A fabulous read that can be picked up and put back down at will without missing a beat.

the perfect anthology of speculative oddities. this really stands out in its strangeness. a kafaesque house, a girl who grows wings as a rite of passage, a insomniac confronts the entity of sleep, a runaway bride encounters a sea creature, a woman desperately tries to recreate the taste of food in a dystopian society flavors can't be felt, and more.

the writing is direct and abrupt which, combined with the stories being relatively short, makes for a impactful presence and a book easy to devour. eerie, haunting and provoking, it's hard to look away.

I’m on record as being a big fan of collections of short fiction. As someone enamored of both beginnings and endings, there’s something wonderfully satisfying about picking up a book that has plenty of both.

Now, there are those who ride hard for anthologies. It’s a proclivity that I understand, to be sure, but don’t quite share. Don’t get me wrong – love a good anthology – but to me, the big winner is always going to be a collection of work by a singular author, even if that means that I’m taking a bit more of a gamble on an individual’s style and substance. But when that gamble pays off? Jackpot.

“Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century” by Kim Fu offers the kind of payout you hope for when picking up a collection by an author with whom you are unfamiliar. So it is with me and Fu’s work – she’s written a couple of novels and this is her first published story collection, but I had never read her work before. Such is the joy of the book critic life – sometimes, you take a swing and see what happens.

In this case, what happened was an engaging, thought-provoking collection of stories. A dozen works of speculative exploration that utilize and subvert genre tropes in equal measure. These are stories that venture into the shadows without fear and travel darkened pathways with resolute boldness. Smart and sharp, riddled with unsettling bleak humor and emotional impact, “Lesser Known Monsters” is a first-rate collection for any fan of speculative fiction.

There are some unsettling love stories – “Sandman” and “June Bugs” both delve into the nature of relationships via some unsuspecting paths. “Twenty Hours” is another one that explores what it actually means to love, and at what point the person you love becomes something else.

Some of the stories take less traditional forms. The collection opens with the enigmatically-titled “Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867,” consisting entirely of the transcript between a person seeking to engage with a simulation and the person serving as that simulation’s operator. “In This Fantasy” consists of an unnamed narrator describing a variety of fantasies, viewing themselves as existing in different times and places. And then you’ve got a story like “#ClimbingNation” that doesn’t necessarily fit into our usual idea of speculative fiction, yet still slots in neatly with the rest of them.

Others focus on the imaginative power of children. Stories like “Liddy, First to Fly” and “The Doll” delve into the true capabilities of youth and how different their encounters with the unknown are from those experienced by adult minds conformed by the rigors of a life lived.

The collection’s final story – and perhaps my personal favorite – is “Do You Remember Candy,” a tale of one woman’s efforts to fight back against the feelings of loss that come from a world in which all sense of taste has been lost. “Scissors,” a story of the freedom of submission by way of avant-garde performance art, is another highlight.

Honestly, we’re talking all killer no filler with this one.

There’s a lot to admire about “Lesser Known Monsters,” but one of the most impressive aspects of the collection is its cohesiveness. These stories have their stylistic and tonal differences, but even as they each carve out their own distinct niches, they also cohere in a manner that ties them together beautifully. Even though a number of these stories appeared first in other venues, the book reads as if they were always intended to be a part of this particular whole. There’s none of the jaggedness or rough edges that you sometimes see in single-author collections, even in ones where all the individual work is of high quality. But here, we have something where the pieces fit together, even when they’re pulled from different puzzles.

Fu’s fiction is packed with ideas. Her methods of exploring those ideas are variable – as I said, while I’m comfortable calling this a collection of speculative fiction, not all of these individual stories necessarily fit that description. And that’s a good thing – that variety lends “Lesser Known Monsters” an energy that is all the more robust because of its broad range.

Ultimately, these are stories about relationships, about the connections between people. Some of those connections are real, others are manufactured. Some are healthy, others not so much. Some spring from the realm of the internal, while others are born of external circumstances. But in the end, the ways in which our lives become entangled are centered within the frame.

“Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century” is a marvelous collection of work by a writer of tremendous gifts. These are stories that manage to be both heavy and buoyant at once, stirring up shadows without ever losing sight of the light. Compelling, thoughtful fiction like this would be difficult enough to generate once; doing it a dozen times is a true feat. In the worlds created by Kim Fu, love – in its presence, its absence or both – is inescapable, orbits intersecting and capturing one another.

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century was an incredibly unique and captivating collection of short stories. As with most compilations, there were definitely stories I enjoyed more than others, but even the ones I didn’t love as much were interesting and thought provoking. The stories range from realistic to slightly futuristic, with an emphasis on technology in several stories throughout.. Some stories introduce actual creatures while others explore the more monstrous elements of humanity. This book is perfect for anyone who enjoys a little bit of blurred reality and magic in their stories.

Notes about a few of my favorite stories from this compilation (5/12 - see, they’re all good!)

Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007868: felt like I was watching a Black Mirror episode while I read this. Strong start to this compilation of stories and full of emotion.
#climbingnation: loved the unexpected twist at the end.
Twenty Hours: possibly my favorite story. A very interesting premise! Sci-Fi technology, but also explores human emotions and relationships.
Junebugs: creature feature involving an abused woman’s fresh start and a whole of bugs
Do You Remember Candy.: people lose their ability to taste foods. This story is about the memories of foods and the relationships/feelings attached to them.

Thank you so much to Tin House and NetGalley for a review copy of this book. I can’t wait to read more by this author in the future.

I have seen the monster and it is us. In this new collection of stories by Kim Fu provides excellent examples of the horrors of womanhood, of aloneness, of the possible futures we face. These stories are some of the most disturbing and powerful I have read in a long time, and I want to both re-read them all and never read them again. This is a masterful collection that will be studied and read and passed from reader to reader, all of them seeking someone to share it with and to talk about it with.

I have yet to go wrong with a Tin House title and this was no exception. I really loved this collection of short stories. Like any collection, there were some that stuck with me more than others. What I really enjoyed was the way in which each story creates its own world that feels just adjacent to our own, with a weird quirk to it that sets the story in motion. In one, a normal girl on the brink of puberty, suddenly begins to grow feathers. In another, the whole world loses their sense of taste, making eating terrible and leading one woman to create a method of invoking the lost sense. One of the longest stories in the collection, "June Bugs," is an unsettling look at a woman escaping from a toxic relationship and finding herself in an equally unsettling situation. Through each of these stories, Fu explores relationships, modernity, and what it means to be human.

I look forward to seeing what Fu does next!

Tersely-told speculative tales of the zeitgeist: sexuality, guilt, technology, depression. As a bookseller, I can recognize this book is absolutely not for everyone, but the short stories here shine under the right readership. Fu expertly deals with dark, difficult and complex topics, a master dressmaker knowing exactly where to cut the expensive silk fabric. Out of everything, I most appreciate Fu's restraint -- these stories could have easily ballooned out of a lesser writer's control, but there's few mistakes in this crystalline, gleaming prose. A real winner and an incredible talent.

I was so looking forward to Kim Fu's debut collection, and it doesn't disappoint. Even the smallest detail--for instance, enjoying char siu bao--is rendered so gorgeously that this reader felt as though I were in the story itself. Notwithstanding their more fantastic elements, each of the 12 tales also serve as commentaries on human nature, for better or for worse.

Short stories are a great introduction to an author's work. Like many short story collections, this has some great ones, some good ones, and some okay ones. My favorites were "Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867" and "June Bugs."

5 imaginative stars

So this was pretty fantastic! A magical realism gem.

"The strange is made familiar and the familiar strange" says the blurb, and I can't think of a better way to describe magical realism!

Writing short stories that are satisfying and engaging is an art in my opinion and Kim fu is a VERY GOOD artist! This is the kind of book I would grab when I need to get out of a reading slump. Ten pages. The end. Story's over. Loved it. Ready for the next. PUFF. BYE READING SLUMP. MAGIC!

And the title is PERRRFECT! Because the topics of these stories are indeed the modern monsters that plague our nightmares: insomnia, social media induced loss of boundaries and empathy, sense of inadequacy. Relevant and Entertaining.

The other thing I loved is that all these stories felt like writing prompts executed by a VERY IMAGINATIVE mind.

Here... write an ingenious story about... hummmmm... I don't know.... less say... "a dog digging a hole"

PUFF! Here... fantastic story delivered!

I was also really impressed with all the wisdom and scientific knowledge weaved into the fantasy of these tales.