The fifteen wickedly entertaining stories in this collection inject the absurd into the everyday to skewer life in the modern age--for readers of Carmen Maria Machado, George Saunders, and Ottessa Moshfegh. Marked by thrillingly weird circumstances, indelible characters, and caustic wit, the stories in Kate Folk's debut collection are perfectly pitched for the madness of our current moment. A ward for a mysterious bone-melting disorder is the scene of a perilous love triangle. A curtain of void obliterates the globe at a steady pace, forcing earth's dwindling inhabitants to decide whom they want to spend eternity with. A man fleeing personal scandal enters a codependent relationship with a house that requires a particularly demanding level of care. And in the title story, originally published in
The New Yorker, a woman in San Francisco uses dating apps to find a partner despite the threat posed by "blots," preternaturally handsome artificial men dispatched by Russian hackers to steal data. Meanwhile, in a poignant companion piece, a woman and a blot forge a genuine, albeit doomed, connection.
Wildly imaginative, genre-bending, and eerily prescient,
Out There depicts an uncanny landscape that holds a mirror to our subconscious fears and desires. Each story beats with its own fierce heart, and together, they herald an exciting new voice in the tradition of speculative literary fiction.
