But echoes of a more vintage macabre can be seen in stories like “The New Veterans,” a Ray Bradbury-inspired tale of an Iraq War vet whose lifelike tattoo may hold a dangerous key to his PTSD. Russell freely admits her debt to contemporary writers of fantasy - Stephen King, George Saunders and Kelly Link. But the darker, more sinister scenarios and characters go further to illustrate underlying themes of loneliness and loss, and to question what it means to be human. Subtler emotional currents flow through the stories - grief, guilt, loss of innocence, helplessness - and irony is almost entirely absent. Outside of two comic pieces, humor takes a backseat in this collection. Breath ripples through each of them, a tiny life in its translucent envelope.” Russell’s sensuous, crystalline language draws us further in with every sentence: “I walk beneath a chandelier of furry bodies, heartbeats wrapped in wings the color of rose petals or corn silk. Until the day his bored wife abruptly transforms into a bat and he is afraid to follow suit - and terrified not to. Since learning that the old legends are hogwash - he’s visible in mirrors, holy water doesn’t burn him, he needn’t drink blood or sleep in a coffin - his eternal life has looked almost normal. In the title story, a centuries-old vampire uneasily probes the cracks in his relatively young marriage. A Miami native who has set much of her fiction in her home state, Russell casts a wider net this time around, into the bleak landscapes of Nebraska and Wisconsin, the far shores of Australia, Japan and Italy. Unlike, say, Oz or Wonderland, these places look familiar at first - though we’re obviously not in south Florida anymore. In this new group of eight stories, Russell once again peers through her color-it-weird kaleidoscope to report on characters trapped in upside-down, looking-glass worlds. In her Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel, “Swamplandia!” a dilapidated theme park on an island off the Florida coast yielded a Southern gothic tragicomedy about a family of alligator wrestlers and their call-and-response with the spirit realm. A home for wayward girls became a finishing school for the daughters of werewolves in her debut short-story collection, “St.

But she shares in the show’s legacy, its groundbreaking combination of genres - sci fi, fantasy, horror, fiction and suspense - that portrayed ordinary people crossing a threshold into the extraordinary.Ī sixth sense seems to steer Russell, who has built a literary reputation by locating the uncanny in the most improbable places.

Sound familiar? At 31, Russell wasn’t even born when Rod Serling’s “Twilight Zone” transfixed millions of Americans every Friday night from 1959-1964.

Vampires in the lemon grove ending