As Russell's imagination soars, so does our joy in reading this collection. They sprout after dark." In many of the stories, characters confront their mortal limitations-some in physical cages, others metaphorically. White legs twining moonward, like swords of wheat. In Vampires in the Lemon Grove, Karen Russell’s new collection of short stories, a soldier’s tattoo depicts the death of a comrade in arms, and a teenage girl dates a ghost. When Miles sees visions of his deceased sisters rising from a plot of grass, he observes that they are "glowing taller and taller. "Proving Up" is the tale of Miles Zegner, a young son of 19th-century homesteaders living on the Nebraska plains whose family is brought to vivid life by Russell's haunting language. In "The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach, 1979," 14-year-old Nal harbors a crush on his older brother's girlfriend, but Russell makes this otherwise ordinary plot her own by introducing a bird that leads Nal to a hidden stash of items that have influenced his past and promise to shape his future. Each story in Karen Russell's new book, Vampires in the Lemon Grove (Knopf), is more inventive than the last, juxtaposing mundane human experiences and profound questions about consciousness, love, and mortality, with a hint of the supernatural. A centuries-old vampire realizes he is too anxious to fly. An imprisoned girl transforms into a silkworm caterpillar, shooting thread from her fingertips. Eleven former presidents are reincarnated as horses.
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