Vampires In The Lemon Grove: Stories

"This singular collection kicks off with a title story that does the near impossible: It makes me care about vampires — a breed more overexposed these days than Labrador retrievers. Other tales are in a literary league far beyond familiar orbits. “Reeling for the Empire,” for instance, imagines a sweatshop in 19th-century Japan where girls spin silk and, as they’re doing so, metamorphose into silkworms. The instant anthology keeper, though, is called “Proving Up.” It’s a Gothic tale of homesteading in Nebraska that dramatizes the payment — in sanity and mortality — that the land demanded from settlers. The daffy-to-devastating sweep of these stories will leave readers reeling."