As children, we believe monsters are hiding under beds and inside of our closets, lurking in the dark and waiting for the right moment to strike. As adults, we have the common sense to know better.
But monsters still lurk in the shadows, their forms have just changed a bit. Ghosts become scarily realistic AI chatbots and the feeling of falling into a never-ending abyss becomes the inevitability of climate change.
Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu was selected as Spokane Is Reading's community-wide read for 2023. In the short story collection, the Seattle-based author details these "monsters" of the future through 12 stories featuring fantastical descriptions and the blending of science fiction, horror and magical realism.
Ahead of her two Spokane is Reading events on Oct. 26 at the Spokane Valley and Central libraries, we spoke with Fu about her writing process and where the inspiration for her strange and surreal prose comes from.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
INLANDER: Where did your love of writing begin?
FU: It's been a lifelong thing. I have this box of old diaries, and there's one from when I was 6 labeled "Book Two." So there was presumably a Book One, but that just means I've been writing since before I can remember.
I remember being in first or second grade and stapling together a bunch of little horror stories that I had written. I just always wanted to write. I really liked reading books and then sort of emulating whatever I was reading at the time.
Did you always aim for the strange, or did that just come about by you emulating what you were interested in reading?
As a reader, especially as a teenager, I really enjoyed reading science fiction and fantasy and continued to love magical realism and genre-bending books. But my first two novels were actually much more straightforwardly realist. And even though I love the fantastical as a reader, I think I felt really intimidated by it for a long time. I would have these fantastical or speculative science fiction concepts in my mind, and then they would fall apart the more I thought about them because I felt like I had to have every aspect of them completely figured out.
When I started to work on these stories in 2017, I felt like I finally sort of broke through that and felt ready to give myself permission to write those small, human stories within these fantastic concepts and not get so hung up on the mechanics forever.
A lot of the stories begin with a really gripping, impactful first line. Is that something that comes to you first or later in the writing process?
It really depends. A few of the stories were driven by that first line in a way. The story "Twenty Hours," the first sentence of that story was actually inspired by a sentence in another short story by Elizabeth McCracken, "The Goings-On of the World," and I still remember it. "One morning, in the last week of May, I got up, got dressed and killed my wife."
It's a totally different story than mine, but that sentence was just killer. I felt like that sentence could've gone in a million directions, so I took it and tried to figure out where I would go with it and settled on "After I killed my wife, I had 20 hours before her new body finished printing downstairs." It was my own take on her brilliant line.
What is your definition of a monster?
I saw Kevin Brockmeier read recently, and he told a story about when he was a student. He wrote a story that had no ghosts in it, but his professor deemed it a ghost story. And I really, really love that anecdote because, in this book, none of the stories have a literal monster in them. So for me, that means that the whole story is structured around this one thing that is so big that it gives us kind of a point of focus. You can look into the eyes of this emotion and now it has a physical shape. It literalizes an abstract feeling into this thing that's chasing you or that you can fight or be defeated by. That's how I believe monsters function here. ♦
Spokane Is Reading: Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu • Thu, Oct. 26 • Free • Spokane Valley Library (1 pm), 22 N. Herald Rd. • Central Library (7 pm), 906 W. Main Ave. • spokaneisreading.org
