​Synopsis via Goodreads: Bret Ellis, the narrator of Lunar Park, is a writer whose first novel Less Than Zero catapulted him to international stardom while he was still in college. In the years that followed he found himself adrift in a world of wealth, drugs, and fame, as well as dealing with the unexpected death of his abusive father. After a decade of decadence, a chance for salvation arrives; the chance to reconnect with an actress he was once involved with and their son. But almost immediately his new life is threatened by a freak sequence of events and a bizarre series of murders that all seem to connect to Ellis’s past. His attempts to save his new world from his own demons makes Lunar Park Ellis’s most suspenseful novel. In this chilling tale reality, memoir, and fantasy combine to create not only a fascinating version of this most controversial writer but also a deeply moving novel about love and loss, parents and children, and ultimately forgiveness.

I read that with Lunar Park, Bret Easton Ellis had written a horror novel. Count me in! I’ve been a fan since The Rules of Attraction presented me with the first gay love scene I’d read. His American Psycho gave me my first immersion into brutal, transgressive fiction. And to be honest, Ellis’ distracted, drug-addicted big-city characters showed me a world that this small town gay boy wished he could at least glimpse in person.

Cruising through the first half of Lunar Park, I didn’t see much serious attempt at horror. He’d put in a couple weird incidents, but mostly the book read like any and all of Ellis’ work. And maybe my love affair with his writing had come to an end. Did the older, sober me really care about apathetic big-league drug fiends? Half-hearted attempts at horror bother me, too. It’s insulting to writers of dark speculative fiction. So what’s going on here? New York Times darling, bad-boy Bret Easton Ellis makes a nod to horror and critics faint from the brilliance of it? How typical.

Okay, so my first impression wasn’t positive, but that first chapter had hooked me hard: pseudo-autobiographical, Ellis created a vivid—and lurid—fictional version of himself. So the narrative itself compelled me to continue for a while longer. After all, I do love when authors insert themselves into their stories (Song of Susannah rocketed up to my favorite Dark Tower installment when the ka-tet searched out this writer in Maine named Stephen King).

Good thing I gave the book a bit longer because as it turned out, just when the doubts set in, Lunar Park really clicked into place.

First of all, I realized the main point. Lunar Park basically gives us Clay with a wife and kid. Patrick Bateman as a homeowner. While bemoaning that the anti-hero was a carbon copy of every Ellis protagonist, I didn’t catch on that the book isn't about a matured character but rather a matured situation. And that’s even more interesting. After that came the logical next step—in the same way that peer pressure can lead to drug and alcohol use, the pressure of familial responsibility begins to break down the Ellis character. He weakens, and no matter how hard he tries, he can’t stop himself from becoming a husband and father. To him, this is a problem that he can’t shake. Sometimes a father and husband looks in the mirror and can’t reconcile himself as the alcoholic or addict that he’s become. For “Bret Ellis,” he can’t understand how the bad boy ended up as a dad in the suburbs.

Then Ellis nailed the horror. In the chapter about “The Tomb.” Ellis wrote one of the scariest scenes I’ve ever read. I had assumed that our author wasn’t going to make an honest effort at chills, but turns out that his build-up throughout the novel created perfect tension and framework. When he finally pulled the trigger, the result was terrifying and believable despite its outlandishness. The narrative had captivated me and firmly suspended my disbelief. All the threads of this story knotted together in a noose around my neck. The rambling New York style proved not so rambling, and whne the tale finished, I saw that Ellis hadn't used a single extraneous word or scene.
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I had lost my faith in Bret Easton Ellis about a third of the way in, but I shouldn’t have. His creative powers are in full force here. Lunar Park is deftly woven. It’s a little satirical about himself and his previous novels. It’s clever and bittersweet. It’s a satisfying puzzle. And it has moments of excellent terror. Lunar Park is a five-star winner!

Black Mirror made a hardcore fan out of me by the second episode. What I love most about Black Mirror is that it doesn’t transport us centuries into the future. The episodes don’t show starships cruising at lightspeed through alien landscapes. Faces and landscapes are familiar. Most importantly—and frightening—is that the technology is familiar, too. The writers and directors play off tech that’s currently in use or in development and fast-forward us five, ten, maybe twenty years. And now four seasons in, we’ve seen an oft-repeated theme of trapped consciousness.

In my favorite episode (so far), “White Christmas,” the trapped consciousness isn’t a twist. Jon Hamm’s character talks about his work right up front, so we can discuss this without egregious spoilers. The technology in this episode is Alexa 4.0. Sure our current devices run aspects of our household: lighting, music, voice-activated Googling. Have you seen that smart-house in Mr. Robot? Black Mirror takes us a few steps further, skipping the tired trope of artificial intelligence. Why implement AI when we can have actual intelligence? Copy your own consciousness and transplant it into a little device (it’s an “egg” in “White Christmas”.) There’s a little version of you inside there, keeping your environment just the way you want it: climate, calendar, cooking. Everything there for you how and when you need it.

A great idea except that the copy of consciousness, for all intents and purposes IS you. And from its perspective, you wake up one day in a blank landscape. You’re trapped inside this little white room, and the almighty voice of the programmer, your new God, informs you that you’re not you. You’re a copy, and your job for all eternity is to keep the heat at seventy degrees and that smooth jazz at volume level five. If you woke up tomorrow morning to that scenario, you’d probably do what the character in the episode does: Yell out a big old screw you. But you’re not a person. You have no rights. You have no control. And the programmer sets a timer and lets you sit for thirty days in that white room without sleep, without television or devices, with no food or drink since you need no sustenance. Nothing for thirty days. 720 hours of nothing. Until the voice of God finally speaks again. Elapsed time out there in the real world? Thirty seconds. He can give you an entire year of nothing, ten years of nothing!

Or you can sit at your control panel and preheat that oven to 450 when the “real” you arrives home at 5:30. You can adjust the mood lighting for the real you when she brings dates home. You can set daily reminders so the real you can pick up prescriptions at Walgreens. The choice is all yours. You can sit for a near eternity and lose your mind with boredom and silence, without the succor of sleep or basic pleasures of drink or food, or you can be a good little drone and do this job.
Versions of this hell play out in several unique episodes, and all the subtleties and vagaries are brilliant. But the unimaginable torture is the same. You wake up and find yourself in an endless loop, or endless pain, or endless boredom. You’re told that you’re not you. And sometimes it’s you yourself who sentenced this on you. You’re a copy. A clone. Your destiny is to serve or suffer. For eternity. Alone.

The genius of this topic is that it’s an update on a very old fear: the premature burial. Edgar Allan Poe himself suffered from the terror of being buried alive. He wasn’t alone. Do a quick Google search of the Goldberg machine-like contraptions people invented so that if they woke in a coffin they could pull a cord and ring a bell. Up through the early Twentieth Century, that was a legitimate fear. When a guy died, he didn’t get a trip to the coroner, maybe an autopsy, and certainly an embalming. His body was put in a box and buried.

In the modern era, this fear has been portrayed with torture or hostage premises. Ryan Reynolds starred in 2010’s Buried. Quentin Tarantino directed a two-part CSI episode about being buried alive, which will make you open your windows or take a walk afterward to relieve the stress.
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Through the lens of Black Mirror, this age-old fear has evolved beyond the literal. It’s no less terrifying. In fact, the technological equivalent is a thousand times more horrible because you won’t die of thirst or suffocation as you tear off your fingernails scratching at the coffin lid. Premature burial may be a gruesome fate, but as a victim of trapped consciousness you will simply live on and on and on and on…
So stay dark my friends, and stay in your own head.

A new friend of mine recommended this book during a conversation about the best new(ish) fiction. It really is a good idea for me to take a break from horror novels of the 70s and 90s and take a peek at what authors write these days. Okay, I’m not that bad, but I often do feel like I’m playing catch-up. I expected good things from Get in Trouble. I did not expect to read life-changing short stories.

Kelly Link writes strong, intelligent prose. That alone is pure pleasure to read. But her narrative style is something sparse and new, and she creates her stories with astounding confidence. Instead of straight-forward description, dialog, and plot, Link’s stories feature a sort of abstract approach. Rarely do we have an orienting opening paragraph or two. These tales begin in medias res, wasting no time with exposition about the weather, the protagonist’s hair and eye color, and the droll (or, actually, the startling inventive) landscapes. We are immediately rocked back on our heels and then must race to catch up. It’s a breathless, pulse-pounding initiation into her every world.

I liked some of the stories better than others. “I Can See Right Through You” left me a little confused and unsatisfied. “Valley of the Girls” and “Origin Story” left me a lot confused and unsatisfied. But even these were written with an admirably fresh prose and forethought.

The stories that did work for me worked like nothing I’ve read since those in The October Country and Skeleton Crew. “The Summer People” started off the whole book with its slow Southern drawl of cosmic horror.  “The Lesson” is the finest modern literary short story I’ve read. Link’s trademark style brings a pleasantly odd perspective to the relationship between these two men, their stresses surrounding a coming baby, and a subtle but steady bad feeling about the groom and groomsmen. “Two Houses” give us a science fiction story, and though that one was included in a Ray Bradbury tribute anthology, I see the master’s influence most in “The New Boyfriend.” And that tale affected me the most. It’s so unique, so new, and perfect that it makes me wonder what I’ve been doing with my life.

Based on this collection, I consider Kelly Link the modern master of magic realism. Nobody writes like her. Nobody has the off-the-wall imagination that she has. Her voice is a force that resonates with me as a reader and as a writer. I cannot wait to read her entire catalog.

Stay dark my friends, and give Get in Trouble a read.